


Masc4Mask

by queeroftherodeo



Category: Bon Appétit Test Kitchen RPF, Chef RPF, Country Music RPF, Music RPF, Orville Peck - Fandom
Genre: Anal Sex, Anonymity, Anonymous Sex, Blow Jobs, Bone Appétit, Brad noises, Fanboys - Freeform, Gay cowboy, M/M, Masks, No wife AU, Semi-Public Sex, Sort Of, Spit Gifting, Spit Kink, Voice Kink, Walk-in, bovrille, committing atrocities against food safety one beej at a time, cowboy, i don't make the rules, idiot lumberjack, masc4mask, mutual appreciation association, showering together, that's the ship name, what's a slow burn but for emotions?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:27:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 47,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21727495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queeroftherodeo/pseuds/queeroftherodeo
Summary: Orville Peck hangs around after filming concludes for his guest spot on It's Alive with Brad Leone, and offers to help him clear up his work space. Once they get inside the walk-in cooler, things start to heat up.
Relationships: Brad Leone/Orville Peck
Comments: 313
Kudos: 267





	1. The Walk-In

**Author's Note:**

> Orville Peck was on It's Alive this past week with Brad Leone. Since then, numerous people in my life (y'all know who you are) have essentially tagged me to write the walk-in sex fic we all wanted after whatever the _heck_ first date malarkey that was we watched. 
> 
> • I'm not making money off this.  
> • I'm not Orville Peck, nor am I associated with him.  
> • I'm also not associated with BA or Brad Leone.  
> • This is fictional (probably).  
> • A dear friend actually came up with the title for this ages ago, before the joke officially hit the internet, I believe, so I credit her with the title. She knows who she is (@mythicaliz).  
> • BIG THANKS to my master beta reader, she also knows who she is (@killthenaughtyboy of tumblr). 
> 
> This ain't my first fanfic rodeo, this AO3 account is an alternate for me. I have fic in other fandoms elsewhere. If you're curious about that, come find me on tumblr @queeroftherodeo
> 
> Yeehaw.

“Let me give you a hand with these.”

“Aw, you don’t have to, I’ve got it, bud.” Brad stacks the lexans with the food that needs to go back into the walk-in, preparing to take a trip down and put them all away. He wants to take the fewest trips possible, always does, but he’s distracted by Orville’s continued presence in the kitchen and it looks like he’s slowing around. Looks like he’s trying to be inefficient in order to hang around a little longer, get another word in after his coworkers disperse, before Orville heads on out.

“No, I insist,” Orville says, one hand taking a pass over the fringe that skims low on his chest from the leather mask, like its long hair he reflexively wants to sweep out of the way. He sidles in closer to Brad and eyes the things he’s gathering up on the counter, sending a clear but unspoken message to the couple of people still hanging around to talk to Orville before he leaves that he’s not going to stick around to humor them.

It seems to Brad like he’s trying to pull away from everyone else. Seems like there’s something between them drawing them together. He feels sure he’s imagining it, that it’s just his own excitement and elation over meeting Orville Peck in real life making him read more into this than was there. 

Even with a home turf advantage, Brad can’t help but feel awkward, like they move at different speeds. Orville’s cooler in every conceivable way, slim and muscular and tattooed and every inch a mystery. It seemed like the longer they talked through filming the episode, the more questions Brad had about him. Where he’d come from, where he’d grown up, what he liked, what inspired him. He’d tried so hard to have them make something he’d like to eat, something a little Mexican-southern-spicy. Something he maybe didn’t get a chance to have much, with his dietary restrictions. 

He can’t shake feeling like even with all the effort he’d put in to being a good host and impressing him, that he’d just come off like a big dumb goof. The butt of the joke. He’s not looking forward to reading the comments when it goes to air. 

“Thanks, thanks,” he hits the _thank you_ twice, half high nervous energy and half his usual enthusiastic cadence. He slides a stack of lexans towards Orville, grabs a nearby towel he’d been using that needs to go in the laundry, flips it over his shoulder and waves in Matt’s direction as he finishes folding down the tripod rig. “We good?”

“I mean, I’d hope so, yeah, or else I shouldn’t have taken the camera down…” This wide grin spreads over Matt’s face as he zips his camera bag shut, attention moving between Brad and Orville like he knows something Brad doesn’t yet.

Brad can feel the scrutiny though. Maybe he’s a bit in denial, feels the energy in the room but doesn’t quite know what to make of it, wishes everyone would just leave and give him some room to think and break it all down.

“Right, yeah. Yeah, of course,” Brad goes too loud, too abrupt in a clumsy effort to cover up his blunder. “Of course we’re good! Lemme know when you get to editing it, okay Hunzi? I wanna check it out, how it all comes together, yaknow?”

Brad doesn’t really process Matt’s response, but he’s vaguely aware that he’s gathered up the gear and headed out of the kitchen. Most of his attention is pulled to the man beside him, who’d just reached to take one more of the clear plastic containers from Brad’s larger stack of them, seemingly intentionally brushing their hands together in the process. 

The kitchen air is too stuffy to try and work it out, to try and piece together all the signals it felt like he’d been on the receiving end of. Orville’s frequent touches, what felt like any excuse to lay a hand on him, to bump against his side. The easy laughter, the body language. It was flirting. Right? It feels impossible to know, and the window of being able to find out is swiftly closing, and Brad feels this sense of panic starting to creep in. If he wants to know, he’s got to do something to find out _now_. But what? This is so much easier with women, because at least when he’s wrong it doesn’t leave him feeling so vulnerable. He’s never been good at navigating this arena with men. 

Toss this level of being starstruck into the mix, and he’s utterly doomed.

“Follow me,” Brad says as he picks up his stack of containers and carries them close enough to his chest that he’ll be able to juggle them and get the walk-in door when they get there.

“Of course, lead the way,” Orville says, ever polite as he falls into step behind Brad, carrying his short stack of containers, his gaze drifting down Brad’s broad back to his ass and takes advantage of the leather and fringe concealing his face to allow himself a sly smile. 

“Yeehaw!” Brad tries it again, and with the handful of practice yeehaws he’d gotten in, this one comes passably low and forceful, but he undermines it as quick as he lands it because he can’t help laughing like he had earlier, damn near high with giddy nerves and helpless to fight it. Especially when the second he starts laughing, Orville joins in behind him, warm and infectious.

Getting the door should be easy, but his brain is miles away and as he shifts how he’s holding everything to work the latch, he almost drops all of the containers he’s holding. He recovers awkwardly with a startled, automatic _oop!_ , using his foot and leg to catch the door before it shuts so he doesn’t have to do this all over again, hugging the containers close so they don’t spill. Before he has a chance to say anything or get the door open, Orville’s come in close. 

“Let me help.” He’s got a hand on the walk-in latch, made a point of touching Brad’s hand as he took hold of it, insinuating himself firmly in his personal space. It affords Brad the opportunity to recover his grip on what he’s holding, and let Orville get the door for him, but he still thinks he can salvage this somehow. 

“Naw, I got it, I got it,” Brad insists, though he definitely doesn’t got it, if the lid sliding off the top lexan is any evidence. 

“You don’t, though.” Orville laughs, and Brad’s struck by the suddenness of the sound and he’s drawn to look for evidence of it, the flash of that quick grin behind the black fringe. 

_Remember what you’re doing, idiot._ Brad tries to mentally shake himself free of looking at Orville, in person, up close, real and in front of him and get back to what he was doing. Trying not to drop everything he’s carrying and look like an even bigger idiot. 

“Right. Yeah, no, I don’t, sorry. Thanks,” he says, struggling to make and keep eye contact, and gives up in favor of letting Orville help him. He moves back a little, out of the way of the swing of the big metal door and lets Orville pull it open for him. 

“You’re welcome.”

The cool air of the walk-in is welcome after filming in the kitchen, under the lights, over the grill, with Orville. He always works up a sweat when he’s in the kitchen, filming, but the anxious, excited nerves ramped that up tenfold today. He’s dying for a second or two alone, to take off his knit cap and run his hands through his thinning hair, splash his face. But there’s no way in hell he’s doing that while Orville’s still here, a half-step behind him. 

Brad moves to the back of the small cooler and sets the lexans down on the middle shelf to the right along with other prepped and stored foods, and then turns to take the stack of containers from Orville to add them to the shelf. He’s surprised, when he turns, to find the masked man as close as he is, and he startles with an audible _oh!_ muttered under his breath. If there was something else he’d said just then, it mostly got lost in the garbled half-sentences and false starts. 

“Sorry I startled you.”

Orville’s leveling him with a look that threatens to undo every shred of work the walk-in’s doing to cool his skin. It’s startling to be this close, close enough that he almost feels as though he knows what Orville must look like beneath the mask but still not be absolutely sure. You’d think the mask and all that fringe would detract attention from his face, and it does at a distance, but this close it just draws his eye. The soft drag of leather fringe over Orville’s full lips has Brad’s full attention. 

In the privacy of the walk-in, it feels easier to drop the big persona he put on for BA videos. It might not be a mask in as literal a sense as Orville’s array of leather and fringed ones are, but it’s a mask all the same, one that puts him at a distance from the world outside the test kitchen. 

“Yeah.” Brad answers, distracted. Wait, that’s not the right response. What had Orville said? He’d apologized. For… for something. “S’okay,” Brad says belatedly, but he’s not fooling anyone. Orville can see where his gaze is focused. 

“Mm, good…” the masked man muses, while Brad’s brain keeps slamming into the barrier the mask presents. 

The hat’s an easy enough fix, he can just take that off. But would he take the mask off? How can— how can he get what he wants with the fringe in the way? But then, does Orville even—? Is he just imagining whatever it is he’s imagining, that this has been flirting, that it’s mutual? 

Orville isn’t moving and where he’s standing, the way they’re positioned has Brad cornered, back to the wire racks. It feels like a long time passes in silence between them, but in reality it can’t more than a minute at most. Brad glances sidelong at the door, at the small window and the bright spot of sunlight streaming through the kitchen beyond it. 

Orville follows his gaze. “How long do you think we’ve got?”

Oh God, no. He’s doing that voice, letting it dip down low and thick and heavy. Brad knows what he’s asking, but the part of his brain that just wants to hear Orville talk in that full depth of timbre plays dumb. 

“Till, till— till what?” Brad’s mouth is going dry and his brain is doing absolute somersaults. This is his chance, if he wants to, to _anything_ , this is his chance and he can’t figure out a way past the mask to make it happen.

“Till someone comes looking for us.” Orville drags his slim, silver-ringed fingers through the fringe of his mask like he might be thoughtfully stroking a beard, concealing the wry grin twisting his mouth with the move. 

“What’sit. Noon? Twelve-thirty, iss’lunchtime,” he strings several words together, loses a few letters in the middle and barely manages a full sentence. “Probly… half an hour.”

 _But there’s a window._ This isn’t anywhere near as private as he wishes it were. Anyone could walk by, really, even though the kitchen should be cleared out. The risk of getting caught felt huge, bigger than he should be comfortable with. No, bigger than he _was_ comfortable with. The problem was, the longer they stood here, this close together, Orville’s voice dipping low and full of promise, the more willing Brad was to risk it. 

“A half hour,” Orville repeats to him, moves a half-step closer. Glancing down between them, those slender hands find their way to the waist of Brad’s pants, fingertips finding belt loops, pockets, dipping in to catch hold, for leverage to get himself a little bit closer. So their bodies brush. “I can work with that.”

Okay, _fuck_. Yeah, okay, he was willing to take the risk, he decided, if it meant more of this.

Brad’s about to say something when Orville edges further into his space, one hand coming up to sweep the fringe aside and leans to bridge the distance between them, to kiss him. It’s not the first time he’s kissed a guy, but it’s not a common thing for him by any means. And the differences that are there — the scrape of Orville’s stubble rather than a smooth face — it’s complicated by the fringe, the mask. It feels like a barrier, like it’s keeping them apart, like he can’t get as close as he’d like to with it there. This isn’t neat or smooth, red hat bumping into Brad’s forehead, but it’s clear this isn’t the first time Orville’s had to maneuver a kiss past the mask. 

It becomes apparent real quick that Brad’s awkwardness up till now has been nerves and not disinterest, definitely _not_ some kind of gay panic that by spending time with the masked cowboy he could find himself on the other end of an unwanted situation. No, this situation was wanted, it was just that Brad wasn’t good at reading signals from men, he second guessed himself— he hadn’t had much experience to go on, when it came right down to it. His awkwardness wasn’t a lack of wanting, but a lack of knowing how something like this was supposed to go. How it was negotiated, initiated, who was supposed to do what and when. 

Orville’s hand moves up to snag the hat from his head before it falls, drops it down blindly on the nearest wire rack, unwilling to break the kiss yet. A hand moves to Brad’s broad shoulder, uses the hold to angle himself in closer. There’s too much clothes between them, the denim of his vest and Brad’s doubled up shirts, and if time weren’t a factor he’d fix some of that. Somewhere in there they need to take a breath and the fringe falls back into the way, but once he’d got a breath he wants back in, wants to pick up where they left off. That’s Brad’s style, his approach. It’s tactile, hands on, figuring it out along the way. The negotiation of bodies. But when Brad tries to bridge the distance between them, emboldened by that first kiss, he comes up against a wall of fringe, frustrated by it. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” he lays on the vowel the way he does, Jersey accent shining through. 

“We can,” Orville says, cool as the walk-in around them, like he was as impervious to the press of their bodies and mouths as his fingertips had been to the freshly grilled corn. “...might be difficult to keep to a half hour, though.”

“Wait, whoa whoa— hold up…” Orville had. Had he? Seriously just suggested they— fuck in the walk-in? “You want—?”

Orville’s just smiling at him, wide and toothy behind all that fringe, and gives a little nod. Lets his gaze dip down Brad’s chest, drinks in that south-western stripe, the solid body beneath. 

“...yeah.” He can hear the grin in Orville’s voice. “Been a fan of yours for years… since the Kombucha. I was excited when you started liking my Instagram posts…”

“What? No...” Brad can’t wrap his mind around that, can’t believe that Orville was a fan of his. That he’d noticed when Brad discovered him, his instagram, when he started hitting like. Oh God, Brad’s thinking about the fact that he tended towards liking the ones where he was in some state of undress, shirtless, in shorts that were too short, lounging in a robe with thighs bare. It was damning, but right now it didn’t seem like that was a problem in the slightest.

“Yep,” Orville hits the _p_ hard, lets it make a soft popping sound as he watches realization dawn on Brad’s earnest face. Watches him pink up all the way to his ears from a mix of nerves running high with desire and the chill of the cooler starting to seep in. 

“Always sort of thought you might swing both ways....”

“You thought so?” Brad asks, grin tugging the corner of his mouth, confidence coming back as he finds his footing, as he starts to get the lay of the land and what they’re toeing around. 

“Mmm,” Orville hums his answer, matching that grin, mirroring his body language as he leans into his space a little bit further. 

“How’d you figure that?”

“I mean, for one, those shoes are a dead giveaway… also, no straight man rolls his pants that far above the ankle.”

“Aw, come on, man, it’s warm out!” Brad can’t help himself, he’s chuckling helplessly at the jab, getting caught up in the easy way Orville slings a back-and-forth. Right then it feels like the rest of the world beyond the walk-in’s fallen away and they’re the only two people in New York. 

“I know,” he’s grinning widely at Brad, teasing and affectionate as he nods in acknowledgement. “But it’s warm out for everyone, and not everyone’s making all of these choices.”

“Oh, _oh_ ,” Brad plays hurt but he can’t wipe the grin off his face. “You don’t like? I see— I see how it is.”

“Hang on now, I didn’t say that… do you think I’d be here, trying to maximize a half hour in a walk-in fridge with you if I hadn’t liked what I saw?”

That… was a very good point, and it shut Brad right up for the time being because his brain got sidelined into a set of circular thoughts that centered around trying to figure out just how they were going to maximize the next half hour. 

“What, ah… what, whadda…”

“What do I wanna do?”

“Mm. Yeah.” Brad’s thankful for Orville having saved him from trying to figure out how to land the question he’d been trying to get out. 

“Well, I’m glad you _asked_ ,” Orville rubs in the fact that actually, Brad _hadn’t_ asked, _he_ had, and smirks as one hand moves between them, between Brad’s legs. He barely cups against him, like a promise or a suggestion, and chases the tease with the heavy heel of his hand.

Brad makes this soft sound like he’s deflating, like the air is rushing out of him with just this much contact. His brain is spiraling around the fact that something is happening as they negotiate just what. Something with a man, at work, _in the walk-in_. And that man was Orville-freaking-Peck. He’d be lying to say he hadn’t had thoughts, hadn’t sometimes perused Orville’s instagram too late at night to have motives that were anywhere near pure.

“I’ve got a couple of ideas. _This,_ ” he nods, gestures down between them. He means they could jerk each other off, here in the walk-in cooler. Might not be the greatest if they can’t find anything to ease the friction, but then, if there’s nothing to ease the friction then fucking’s right off the table, too. 

Brad, for his part, could almost be good with just letting Orville carry on touching him through his pants as long as he kept talking like that. He loved his voice so much, so deep and masculine and rich. It’s a voice of experiences, stories, of places he’s been and confidence in his abilities and Brad just wants to curl up in the heaviness of it and let it take him over.

 _Almost._ Because then Orville takes his hand back because he needs both, and like he had before they’d eaten the elote earlier, he’s separating his fringe in two and starting to braid it, working the left side first. He’s creating easier access to his mouth and he’s holding eye contact, blues eyes blazing as he carries on talking in that slow, methodical tone. 

“Or… we could keep on kissin’... see where that leads.”

Brad feels pinned. Feels like his body is heavy and immovable, feels trapped. Even if he wanted to escape, how could he? He can feel himself swiftly losing ground, getting lost in those eyes, in that unveiled interest he can read in them, more shocking even than the bluntness of his words.

Brad can imagine a few possibilities of where kissing could lead, but doesn’t see a way for that to go that didn’t end in either destroying the walk-in or walking out of here unsatisfied, stopping short of— of, _well_. 

Orville finishes the first braid, and he’s about to move on to the second. He takes a break before he starts to illustrate that second option, bridges the distance between them again, one hand on his loose fringe to keep it out of the way and the other catching in the hanky tied around Brad’s neck like it was a collar or a leash. He lingers on Brad’s mouth a little too long, slow to pull back, and when he almost has, tugs him closer again for one final taste. Orville hums softly, like he’s weighing in with his opinion about a particularly delicious dish that had been set in front of him for taste testing. _Mmm._

“N’ye— eugh…” Brad’s protest at the loss is meaningless, garbled, his thoughts getting trapped in the gears of his mind before they make it from brain to mouth. He tries to follow Orville’s lips as he pulls back, but a surprisingly strong hand pressed against his chest holds him firm.

Orville uses the space he’s enforcing between them to finish the second braid. The way it’s separated frames his pretty mouth in a truly obscene way, and Brad wonders what it says about him that he’d considered this before. That he’d wondered if Orville might braid the fringe like this for access if the mask stayed on in the bedroom. He hates to admit he’s had that thought since the first picture he’d seen of him with the fringe parted like this.

“Or,” Orville starts and stops, leans in close enough that Brad forgets what he’s doing, that he’s presenting him with suggestions, that he’s meant to pay attention and choose, instead trying to steal another kiss from the masked man. Orville dodges it easily and smirks to himself as Brad bumps against his cheek with a grumble at the rejection. He makes his final suggestion close enough to Brad’s ear that between the soft dip in his voice and the fringe that drags against the bare skin of his neck, he’s sure to raise a shiver from the cook. “I could get on my knees and let you fuck my mouth.”

“Holy shit,” Brad whispers, the hot puff of his breath visible in the chill air. 

Orville grins, nuzzling Brad’s neck, taking advantage of how inexperienced he was. He’s pulling out all the stops like he’d decided it’s his mission in life to destroy him. The taller man lets loose this helpless little sound, shivering from the cold and the feel of the singer’s hot mouth on his skin, teeth dragging light beneath his ear. 

They both know what option he’s going to choose, but Brad gets side-tracked with the attention. Turns into it and catches Orville’s mouth with his, takes advantage of the fringe being well contained and kisses him— actually kisses him, rather than allowing himself to be kissed by him. Brad’s broad hands find their way to Orville’s slim hips, thumbs feeling the edges of that oversized buckle, and the smaller man hums against his mouth. 

Parting briefly for air and clarification, Orville murmurs, “So… you wanna just keep kissing, then?”

That’s fucking tempting, but— 

“Oh, fuck no.” Brad answers without hesitation, but as soon as he had he goes back on it, steals another kiss because he wants another taste of him. Doesn’t think he’ll ever get enough of this, that mouth so soft in contrast with the subtlest scrape of stubbled jaw. The weird, foreign addition of the leather of the mask a surprising thrill.

“Mm… seems you do.” Orville’s not complaining, allowing Brad to take what he wanted in the kiss.

“Well, yeah, I do— yeah I do. But I wanna... fuck yer mouth.” Just saying it out loud felt like a rush, a high. 

There’s no way he’s getting out of this cooler unscathed.

Orville’s surprised he’d managed to say it out loud, makes that much clear with a simple raise of his eyebrows that behind the mask is all but unseen, save for something in the twinkling expression in his blue eyes. He doesn’t say anything because they’re on a time crunch here and the truth of the matter is that however much Brad wants his mouth on him, Orville wants Brad’s cock that much or more. 

“Are you sure?” Orville’s playing with him, teasing. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out Brad likes his voice, gets off on it. He’d all but said it earlier, the way he’d reacted with that reflexive silly grin when Orville hit the low _yeehaw_ , unable to make eye contact as he went red to his ears.

For a second Brad doesn’t know how to respond. Doesn’t know what he’s playing at, why he’s second guessing his decision, but he catches on fast as Orville’s hands move over his body. Down between them, starting to work at the fly of his pants, to ease them open. 

“Yea’ungh,” the words garble and get lost together, a nod _yes_ and a groan as bony knuckles slip inside his jeans. He’s touching but not _touching_ him, unzipping him just enough to slip one hand inside. 

“So you’re sure…” Orville begins, rolling his shoulder forward in pursuit of the right angle as he fits his hand down the front of Brad’s jeans, finding his way inside his boxers. Fingertips drag through soft, warm curls and he finds him, way more than half-hard already. Brad’s suddenly not so sure, because Orville on his knees couldn’t keep talking in his ear like this.

“I’m— I,” Brad starts but Orville squeezes and suddenly there’s a clatter behind them. Brad grabbed for the wire racks for something to hold onto and ended up elbowing something on the shelf, clumsy. “ _Fffuck_.”

“We could go back to kissing,” Orville leans close enough to nose into Brad’s neck, press a kiss open mouthed to the skin above the bandanna. He’s as red faced now as he’d been when he tied it on him. “...I could get you off like this. Quick and dirty with my hands…”

Orville gives a stroke, a little twist. Brad’s hard and hot in his hand, feels good, thick. Orville wants more than a half hour with him, wants a couple hours, wants a whole night spent doing everything but sleeping till the sun comes up. If he gets his way, he’ll get both. 

“ _Orv_ ,” Brad loses momentum in the middle and gives up on his name, makes it a nickname. There’s an unspoken _please_ in there. A request for the masked cowboy to have mercy on him. To make the decision for him, to let him free from the tease. 

“All you’ve gotta do is choose. You can have anything you want…” Orville sucks a kiss into Brad’s throat, threatens to leave a bruise but stops short. Gives him a preview, a taste of what his mouth was capable of. 

It’s up to Brad to decide where he wants it, where it’s put to the best use. 

“M-mouth,” Brad tries, like that's an answer. Orville grins against his jaw, prepared to give him shit for the misstep, ask him _where_ he wants his mouth. But before he gets a chance to, Brad lays a heavy hand on his shoulder and grips tight, pushes down. Makes his choice clear. 

He wants Orville on his knees. 

Orville’s impressed, but the grin and that teasing expression are gone. They’re not playing anymore; Orville’s in this now. He may still be wearing a mask, but there’s open need etched in his face, in the gleam of his eyes, the shape his mouth takes as licks his lips and sinks down onto the cold floor. 

He’d prefer to take his time, but there’s a thrill in needing to be quick. In the risk of being caught, of holing up somewhere not quite in the open but damn close enough and trying to take as much as possible before the clock runs out. 

Orville runs his hands up Brad’s thighs and tugs his jeans down a bit, enough. Quickies in the cooler don’t come with getting undressed, but he needs access. He watches Brad spring free from his jeans and boxers, a whisper of steam rising from his dick in the cold air. His mouth waters for it, doesn’t recall a time recently he’d hungered for a taste as much as he was right now. 

He spares a glance up through mask and lashes as he leans in, watches Brad watching him as he presses a kiss soft against the head. Brad’s gripping the rack he’s leaning on so hard his knuckles are stark white. He’s saying something entirely incomprehensible, for a moment, letting his head fall back like the eye contact was too much with everything else. It’s short lived because he wants to see, needs to sear this into his memory for later when he’s wondering if this really happened or if it was the product of some wild fever dream. 

The heat of Orville’s mouth is a stark contrast with the chill of the cooler, and it’s tripping him out, raising shivers on his skin. He’s fighting the urge to lay a hand on Orville’s leather-clad head as he feels him chasing the drag of his lips with a sweep of his tongue and sinks down, taking more of him into his mouth. What he hasn’t fit in his mouth yet is taken care of with a hand curling easy around the base, giving a slow stroke that bumps the head up against the roof of Orville’s mouth and Brad reacts like he’d been shocked, letting loose a stream of nonsense noises like he’s repeatedly trying and failing to get a word out. Orville doesn’t have any right to be this good at this.

“Buh…” He un-clenches his fists from the wire racks and grips it again a few times with fretful, drumming taps. He wants so bad to get his hands on Orville’s head but he’s fighting to resist it. Why, he doesn’t know. The mask just throws him; there’s so much mystery and intrigue built up around it that it doesn’t feel right to touch it without permission, even _now_.

As if somehow aware of the battle he was fighting with himself, Orville’s free hand catches one of Brad’s and pulls it towards him, presses it down on the top of his leather-clad head. That, that’s strange, that’s something new for him. It’s not that it feels wrong, it just feels… unspeakably kinky.

“G’yee— unh,” Brad startles, reacts to leather rather than hair under his palm. When his hand curls it’s around nothing, an empty fist resting on his head as he starts to move, bob his head slowly, pulling more sounds from Brad like he’s a broken coffee maker. It’s becoming clear to Orville that he really just never shuts up, that maybe he’s not always talking but when he’s not, he’s trying to, so full of fragmented words they just come spilling out of him.

Brad relaxes his hand and lets it lay, resting heavy on Orville’s head and tries to… he doesn’t know. Focus on how he’s moving or, or somehow find a foothold because it feels like his brain just keeps going offline. Any thoughts, anything that went through his mind just disappears, leaves him utterly and completely blank. Like there isn’t room for anything but the way that mouth feels on his dick. 

Fingertips feel the edge of the laces down the back of Orville’s head, and he’s struck with a split second of wondering what he looks like. Of wanting to see his face, to know what he really looks like. Who he is. There’s not room enough in his head right now to wonder what it means that he’s doing this at work with someone who’s probably definitely going by a stage name, that he doesn’t know his real name, that he doesn’t know what he even really looks like. Those thoughts will have to come later. As it is, that split second wonder disappears in a flash that leaves him blank again and unaware what he’d just been thinking about.

“I’m guh,” Brad stutters and falls silent, blissfully quiet for a breath or two as Orville does something unspeakable, _god knows what,_ that twists up his spine and has his body starting to go tense. “Weh—” _fuck._ “Ohmygod, what, what? What was that, _fuck_ , you’re so good at that…” 

Whatever that thing was he’d done, he does it again and again when he hears Brad babbling mindlessly about how good it felt, and when Brad’s eyes refocus on the man kneeling at his feet he’s got a front row seat for his hand coming away, for his mouth picking up the slack, for the nose of the mask coming close enough that he feels leather kiss his skin. 

Orville’s taking him in his throat like it’s nothing, and it’s most definitely _not_ nothing. 

“ _Oh_.” 

Brad has completely fucking short circuited. He’s at the point in this where there’s nothing stopping him. A meteor could crash through the test kitchen, and he was still going to come hard before he died. 

As if on fucking cue, the walk-in door thumps like it was opened and the person coming in changed their mind real damn fast and let it shut again without coming inside. It jars Brad enough to draw his eye, but nowhere near enough to throw him out of the moment. 

_Delany._

“Fuck!”

He saw his face in the window but it was gone in a flash. “Shit, sorry!” the familiar voice calls. 

It wasn’t enough to shake Orville from the task at hand. He barely halts in the commotion, feels a sick thrill at the close call, maybe too close. Orville thrives on pushing the envelope, on adding more to the mix, on straying far from vanilla.

Brad just hopes no one else comes to look. Hopes maybe Delany manages to keep people away for another five minutes. He can’t even think about Delany right now; he’ll deal with that later. 

_“Fuck,”_ he says again, but this time different. Lower, more pointed, aimed at Orville and what he’s doing with his mouth and not the doorway and whatever lay beyond it. Orville’s working him over eagerly, practiced, confident. He’s managed to hone in on a combination that has Brad’s thighs shaking, has his hand groping over the crown of his mask, worrying the leather like he can’t wrap his head around its presence, can’t stop looking for hair to fist.

When Brad comes it’s loud and hard with a halting, stuttered stream of sound. He comes down Orville’s throat and the cowboy swallows it down, Brad’s voice finding its way into a groan that breaks out of his chest. His hand finally caught enough in the mask that he’s gripping it, threatening to pull it loose, if not off. A half-step behind, Orville brings his free hand up, tugs the edge of it back down to keep it on, but his main focus is on seeing this through. On staying with him as he rides his orgasm out, until this turns into _too much_. 

Greedily, Orville just wants to keep his mouth on him. Takes such incredible pleasure in being the one to cause Brad to unravel quite so profoundly, and he’s sucking him dry and watching up the length of his body as he tries and fails to catch his breath, every inhale just getting lost in more helpless sound. 

If his mouth weren’t otherwise occupied, he’d be grinning ear to ear, smug.

All at once it’s too much and Brad’s pushing Orville away because he can’t tell him to stop, can’t do more than make these strangled, desperate sounds that he’s willing the other man to understand. Fortunately he does.

Orville gets to his feet and collides with Brad’s mouth, kisses him hard, hands moving to Brad’s thick upper arms and holding him back against the wire racks. He’s different now than he had been when they’d started, he’s not the same slow, methodical tease. He’s got a fire lit in him, an edge of desperation. He’s needy, and he’s so hard in his jeans it’s downright pornographic. 

Brad can taste himself on Orville’s lips and that shouldn’t be so hot, but it is; he groans into his mouth, his hands starting to move with a mind of their own (God knows Brad’s still isn’t back online) looking for skin under that denim vest and t-shirt. 

Brad wants to touch him, and fuck if Orville doesn’t want him to, but they’re out of time. 

Orville’s the one who finally puts the brakes on, not because he wants to but because he wants too much. Maybe because he doesn’t want to get Brad fired, because they’d already been seen and Brad surely has to go smooth that over. Because what he wants can’t be had in whatever little time they’ve got left.

Orville pushes Brad back against the racks, hands on his forearms to stop him, and extricates himself from the kiss reluctantly. 

His mouth was absolutely obscene, lips shining wet with saliva, kiss-swollen and red. He’s still catching his breath when he drags his eyes from Brad’s face, glances down as he fishes in his back pocket for his wallet. 

“Wha— where’re ya goin’?”

Brad pushes off the rack and tries to lean into Orville’s space, he wants to touch him so bad. Wants to so much his hands ache, but Orville had sent a message and even if he hadn’t, Brad hardly knows what to do, where to start. 

Orville fumbles with cards in his wallet, pulls a paper sleeve from the bill compartment and takes one of the two cards tucked inside it out and returned it to the wallet, pressing the second card still contained in the sleeve into Brad’s palm as he tucked his wallet back away. 

“Orville,” Brad says the man’s name like a question, like what he’s really asking is _why are we stopping?_ He’d clearly forgotten the interruption, the reality of the world outside the walk-in, the fact that lunch was almost over and he was facing down the rest of his day looking as obviously and freshly fucked as he did.

“I’m staying at the Sohotel, room 213.” The number _213_ was scrawled neatly on the card’s sleeve.

Brad just stares down at the hotel keycard in his hand like he can’t puzzle together what it means. 

“Come find me later if you want to finish what we started.”


	2. The Hotel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After filming _It's Alive_ at the BA test kitchen earlier that day, Brad takes Orville up on the invite to join him that night in his hotel room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big huge thanks are owed to a great number of people for enabling me to continue this thing. 
> 
> • Firstly, to @killthenaughtyboy of tumblr for consistently sending Bovrille thirst my way, and for offering me some pivotal feedback that is going to make for some delicious banter in the next few chapters.
> 
> • To @soho-x of tumblr / sohox of ao3 for her constant cheerleading/hype, reading my "dailies" and giving me feedback, and helping me hash out various issues in the plot as I encountered them. 
> 
> • To @mythicaliz of tumblr / ao3 for 1. coining the term Bovrille 2. suggesting the title sometime last year BEFORE Orville was even on BA and 3. turning me on to Orville Peck in the first place. This fic wouldn't exist without you.
> 
> I basically wrote this and the other chapters of Masc4Mask for you guys, and for myself. If anyone else likes it, that's just icing on the cake.
> 
> • HUGE THANKS is owed to @nectarine-migraine of tumblr / nectarinemigraine of ao3 for being a beta/editor and tolerating my sheer stupidity when faced with 1. the word rein and 2. the english language in general. I love you.
> 
> Thanks to my mammal who knows who they are, thanks for listening and being a good friend and tolerating my ongoing nonsense about these two.
> 
> And another thanks to @imincognitohere of tumblr for not yet Misery-ing me, despite intermittent threats. 
> 
>   
> **Note: This is an AU. As such, there are no wives/significant others. Also, there is no freaking coronavirus -- this is an escape for me from real life, so as we come up to the current timeline, I'm veering a hard left.**
> 
> [The Room](http://www.thesohotel.com/junior-suite) | [The Food](https://www.casabocadonyc.com/) | [The Shirt](https://shop.bonappetit.com/products/adams-favorite-shirt?variant=29473865138221)

It’s almost six by the time Brad’s making his way up the single set of steps that lead to the second floor of the Sohotel.

It’s an interesting place, nice but in a kind of hipstery, gentrified way, not unlike a lot of neighborhoods in this part of NYC. Brad had eyed the restaurants that made up the true first floor on his way to the lobby, already having serious thoughts about _Casa Bocado_. He typed the name into his phone quickly so he could pull up the menu and check the hours — midnight, good — and then pocketed his phone again and pulled out the keycard in its paper sleeve. He rereads the number _213_ for the hundredth time since Orville had handed it to him hours earlier, just to be sure he knew where he was going.

When he’s finally standing outside 213, the creeping doubts and second guesses are coming to a head. Why hadn’t he DMed Orville sometime during the afternoon to ask if he was really serious about the invite? What if he wasn’t back here yet, what if he was off somewhere hanging out with someone else? He half considers sending a message now, but it feels unspeakably awkward to send a DM right now, while standing outside of his hotel room door. No, he’s gotta just knock.

Brad sets the bag he’s carrying down for a minute so he can take off his hat, smooth out his hair and put it back on. He’d taken a shower about a half-hour ago at the office and found a fresh shirt in wardrobe — a dark, crisp denim button up. He knew he looked okay but he was nervous, wanted this to be… wanted this to be good? To be right? Perfect? He didn’t know. He just knew he was worried about fucking up, like somehow the way things had gone earlier was putting more pressure on now.

He’s feeling on edge, at a disadvantage, like he’s got something to prove. But more than that, he just wants to get his hands on Orville, wants to have permission to touch. With time and distance from earlier, he can’t believe that he’d let his nerves make him hesitate, make his hands unsure. What if that had been his only shot? Hell, it might have been. He’s not sure how it’s going to go, knocking on Orville’s hotel door — barely lets himself hope, despite the fact he’d been given the keycard.

He lets out a shaky breath, mutters a little to himself, does one final adjust to his knit cap, and picks the bag back up again before knocking on the door. There’s barely a pause before he hears Orville’s voice from the other side.

“Come on in.”

Brad’s startled by that, sort of expected to be let in rather than letting himself in, even having been given the key. He fumbles with it and moves it in the card reader until the light blinks green, and he shoulders his way inside. The first thing he notices, aside from how over the top this room is and the fact that there’s country music playing quietly, is that Orville’s mask is already parted and braided, and he’s wearing a black on black Bon Appetit logo t-shirt that he’d chopped the sleeves off of to turn into a tank top. It feels like a statement or an invitation.

Orville doesn’t bother standing from where he’s sitting, faded denim-clad legs crossed on the crisply tufted leather sofa on the far side of the room, he just looks up from his phone. His thumb is still hovering over the screen as he lets his gaze slip down Brad’s body, taking in what’s different between earlier and now. The dark denim shirt, damp hair curling and peeking from under his cap — a tell-tale sign he’d showered — but what’s the same? Pants, shoes, and the bandanna Orville had tied around his neck during the shoot, though now it’s tucked in his shirt pocket.

Orville grins behind the fringe of his mask, charmed at what that little detail says about him. Orville can’t help but wonder if he’d considered tying it back around his neck but thought better of it, decided that’d be a step too obviously desperate.

“Hey.”

“Howdy. You look nice,” Orville voices his approval. “You keep spare shirts at work?”

“Oh, yeah. I keep a couple. Never know, with a kitchen. There’s a wardrobe too, for shoots and stuff.” Brad doesn’t offer up the information that he’d raided wardrobe for this shirt because the couple he had in his office weren’t remotely nice enough for tonight, because that means admitting that he’s trying hard when he wants to come off like he’s playing it cool. The reality is, he doesn’t need to say it, because the effort he’d put in is obvious.

“Makes sense.” Now, Orville flicks his phone screen dark with his thumb and, uncrossing his legs, leans to give it a gentle toss onto the leather trunk style coffee table, aware of Brad’s eyes on him as he moves.

“What’s that?” Orville asks, gesturing to the bag Brad’s holding, and settling back against the back of the sofa, legs part just enough that one has to wonder if it’s intentional. If it’s an invitation.

“Oh this?” Brad gestures up with the bag and crosses the room to come set it down on the coffee table, pushing the canvas bag down to reveal the four big glass home-brew bottles it contains. “This is uh, some kombucha I had over in the ol’ fermentation station that was just about ready to go, thought you might wanna give it a try.”

He’s trying to play it as cool as possible, way cooler than he feels. He doesn’t want to seem like he’s trying too hard, like he’s coming on too strong, despite the fact that he’s already in. He doesn’t need to keep trying, doesn’t need to worry about rejection — Orville wanted him here. Mission accomplished. But Brad can’t shake the feeling that he’s going to do something that’ll show his hand, reveal the fact that he’s uncool and Orville will ask him to leave.

“Oh, is this the _famous_ kombucha?” Orville asks, voice rising with open interest.

“ _Well_ , I dunno about that, but it’s pretty good.”

“ _Bitchin’,”_ Orville grins behind the fringe, a nod to that first _It’s Alive_ , one that Brad almost misses but doesn’t, catches a little late with a delayed, delighted laugh.

“Bitchin’! _Hell_ yeah, Brad’s Bitchin’ Booch. Pretty strong if, uh, you know what I mean.”

“Well, I’ll be,” Orville slides right into a rough pantomime of a shocked southern lady accent mixed up with his deep, rich baritone, complete with a scandalized hand moving to clutch non-existent pearls. “Brad Leon, are you trying to get me drunk so you can have your way with me?”

Brad goes pink, can’t help it, and he corrects him reflexively, playing around with him. “It’s _Leone_.”

“That handkerchief says it’s Leon.” Orville nods to the hanky still tucked in Brad’s shirt pocket.

“Oh. Well,” Brad flounders, not quite sure what to say as he stands awkwardly, one bottle in his hand as he fiddles with the mechanism on the top keeping it sealed. He can feel his ears have gone pink, knows he looks as out of his depth as he feels, and he can’t shake the feeling that this was maybe a big mistake.

“Well regardless, Mr. Leon _e_ ,” he makes sure he over-emphasizes the e, “you definitely don’t need to ply me with illegal booch to get me to put out…”

“Well I dunno about _illegal_ , I’m not selling it to ya,” but he’s not going to fight him on that because technically he’s right, and furthermore, he’d rather take aim at other parts of what he’d said. “I don’t, huh?”

“No.” Orville smiles, and Brad’s struck by his expression, surprisingly open, especially given the continued presence of the black fringed mask concealing most of his face. “However, I’m not about to turn down free booch… especially some made by a master.”

Brad can’t help himself, nerves and this little back and forth have him wound tight enough that the _master_ comment strikes him so funny he erupts with a burst of laughter that lights his face up, crinkles his eyes. “A master, huh? You’re laying it on thick.”

“Ye-ah,” Orville says the word slow, hanging onto it and giving it two syllables, then adds, “I like it thick.”

Brad about chokes on air as he hands one of the bottles of now-opened kombucha to Orville, the look on the masked man’s face making it absolutely clear that he’d meant it just the way it sounded.

“C’mon and join me,” Orville invites him, one hand patting the brown leather beside him. Brad takes up a bottle of his own, flips the lid and knocks a long swig back before taking the offer and settling down beside him.

Watching, Orville can’t keep himself from commenting, doing so only once he’s seated, “Maybe you’re the one who needs plying with booch... should I be offended?”

Brad looks over at him, his bottle resting against the firm leather of the sofa, between his thighs, hand curled tight around the neck. He didn’t mean to come off like he needed a drink to do this, and he wants to make sure he doesn’t think that’s true, but he feels like he’s stumbling every time he opens his mouth around Orville.

“No, Orville... no, I’m just,” pause. “I’m just nervous,” he laughs a little uncomfortably at himself, a small, sheepish, awkward smile playing around his mouth. “This is wayyy outside my comfort zone.”

“You mean to tell me letting a strange cowboy suck you off in the walk-in isn’t just a normal Thursday thing for you?”

Brad laughs reflexively, looking away from Orville and down at his hands briefly, fiddling with the bottle’s lip before daring to look back. “No, it’s not,” and then, when it registers, “My God, the walk-in... that was so un-hygienic...”

“I didn’t hear you complaining about _hygiene_ earlier.”

“Yeah, well,” Brad starts without any real idea where he’s going with that, and watches Orville tip back his bottle and take a swig.

“Oh. _Oh_ , that’s...” Orville tips the bottle towards his nose and gives a sniff, and then takes another sip of it and considers thoughtfully. “...that’s good.”

“Yeah?” Brad brightens as they edge into more familiar territory, pleased that Orville’s enjoying something he’d made. He wants to cook for him properly, breakfast in the morning. He doesn’t let himself linger too long on that thought, because it’s not realistic. It’s not something he can have, so it’s best not to want it.

“Yeah,” Orville echoes back emphatically. “Dangerously good. Goes down real easy.”

He doesn’t add anything to that. The tone alone is enough to make it suggestive, to fill in the blanks, to add on the unspoken _just like I did earlier in the walk-in,_ or conversely, _just like your cock in my throat._ He leaves it open for interpretation, and judging by the look on Brad’s face, he takes it exactly as it was intended. Filthy as fuck.

Brad looks around the room, from the brick wall with its arched window to the forest green accent wall behind the large bed’s dark headboard and the bright, sunny yellow walls that make up the rest of the room. It’s a mix of rustic, with the live-edge floating nightstands, and cleanly stylish with the crisp lines and bold colors that even Brad appreciates. Knowing what he knows of hotels in the city, he knows this one wasn’t cheap.

The music changes from some early Dolly Parton to something Brad can’t automatically place, and on the backside of another long swig, he asks, with a nod to the weird retro-looking sound system to their right, “Who’s this?”

“Oh my _God_ ,” Orville rocks to the side in response to Brad’s question, reeling like he’d been slapped.

“What?”

“ _Who’s this?_ ” Orville parrots the question back and clasps his hand to his chest like he’s been wounded, “Conway Twitty? Just one of the greatest rock-to-country crossover artists of all time.”

“Oh! I know Conway Twitty—”

“Okay, well _good,_ I’m glad, because I was going to have to kick you out and keep the booch as compensation for my mental anguish.”

“Your mental anguish!” Brad repeats with a laugh as the song hits a line that jogs the title for him, _you want a man with a slow hand. You want a lover with an easy touch, you want somebody who will spend some time._

“Are you mocking me?” Orville asks, resting his kombucha on one thigh so the other hand is free to give him a goodhearted slap on the arm. An excuse to touch him, pure and simple.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Brad says. Slowly but surely, he’s starting to find his footing here. He’s settling into the back and forth banter with him, not wholly unlike earlier when they were filming the segment, except here without a camera crew and dozens of eyes on them, they’re freer to speak and act. To touch.

Orville’s hand settles on Brad’s knee, the soft gray fabric there, and he gives a gentle but deliberate _pat_. In that one move, the distance between them has been bridged and Brad, for one, can’t imagine why on earth they aren’t touching more than this yet. He’s not saying it, just thinking it and boring holes through the back of Orville’s hand with his eyes, so he’s shocked when it seems like Orville reads his mind. He takes the bottle from where Brad had it tucked between his thighs and deposits it along with his own on the coffee table, and instead of settling back down, uses the momentum of his movement to shift around and move to his knees, swinging one leg over Brad’s lap and settling down astride him easy.

Brad’s struck with both the intensity and openness he sees in Orville’s eyes behind the mask; it catches him by surprise to realize he’s been staring a couple beats too long.

“Hi,” Brad says softly, as if they hadn’t already greeted each other when he walked in.

“Hey,” Orville says, leaning in for a kiss that Brad chases when he sees it coming, but when his hat bumps Brad’s forehead he has to pause a second — remove it and drop it down on the sofa beside them — before coming back in to capture Brad’s mouth.

Whatever kept Brad from feeling like he could touch earlier isn’t here anymore. His hands settle on Orville’s thighs, feels the lean muscle through the worn-thin denim, fingers searching higher until he finds hips and waist. Without the pressure of a time limit, without the risk of someone walking in, he’s got space to think. Or, well, if not exactly _thinking_ , then to let go. To let their bodies figure out how they fit together. Brad’s tactile. He doesn’t have a lot of experience with men, but what experience he has, he’d negotiated through this wordless communication.

At the urging of Brad’s strong hands Orville rolls his hips, grinds his body down, and both men moan soft and lost between them.

They break for air because Brad needs to breathe and he has something he wants to say, but he doesn’t get words out before Orville’s kissing him again. The Orville from earlier — the one who’d started out cocky and collected — isn’t here now. Now he’s hungry and he’s picking up where they’d left off in the walk-in: worked up and left wanting.

Orville’s trying hard to reel it in, remind himself they’ve got all night if they want it, but it’s hard to hold onto that thought. He half-wishes he’d gotten off before his shower, feels like he might be easier in his skin now if he had. But he hadn’t, he’d wanted to maximize this if Brad showed up, wanted to come at him with all the pent up energy he’d sparked in him. Maybe that was a mistake, what with Brad’s lack of experience, to come into this already so on edge, but there’s nothing for it now but to carry on through.

Orville doesn’t stop moving now that he’s started, keeps on grinding his hips down on Brad real slow while Brad’s big hands roam up his back, down over his hips, cupping his ass, guiding and encouraging him in turn. He’s learning his body and the way he moves, and slowly as their kisses deepen and grow urgent, the hand on Orville’s ass starts to rub along the seam in his jeans like he’s looking for a way to rub a hole in them and get to where he wanted to touch. Orville reacts to that like a fire’d been lit in him, raising up a little at first, too much, not enough, and sinks down hard and purposefully as he pulls from Brad’s mouth. This time, he needs to catch his breath.

“I wanna taste,” Brad says without thinking.

“Fuck,” Orville manages, voice thick with need. “ _Yes_.”

The next thing Brad hears is a thud, and he realizes what it was when the next one comes — Orville wriggling his feet out of his chucks and letting them fall on the floor. Then they’re both fumbling with Orville’s jeans as the masked singer leans back, Brad grabbing for the buckle of his belt but Orville’s hands slip down between them and make quick work of his belt and fly, and then he’s raising up over Brad, hands braced on the cook’s shoulders as he feels those big hands shucking his jeans down.

“Commando.” Is that a question or is it praise? It’s hard to tell when Brad sounds like he’s uncovered something holy.

“Yeah,” Orville sounds rushed, breathless, “No panty lines.” He grins down at him, toothy and stupid with lust.

Brad doesn’t have the brainpower left to wonder at his phrasing because Orville’s half-naked and hovering over his lap and he wants to do everything to him and doesn’t know where to start. He looks caught in the headlights for a half-second, but leans in and presses a kiss to Orville’s chest through his cut-off Bon Appétit tee as his hands curl around his bare thighs just below his ass, pulling him close. One hand strays up to curl around his cock and he relishes the heaviness of it in his palm, can hardly believe that he’s here, that he’s doing this. That Orville wants him to.

“Oh yeah.”

And he does want him to.

Brad thinks maybe he could reach him like this if Orville stays kneeling and he tries to make that work, curls forward, leans down, tries to steal a taste of him — and he can, as it happens, manage a flick of his tongue, a whisper of lips over the head — but much more is going to be awkward unless they move. For a few desperate moments he _tries_ because the broken sound he’d stolen from the man above him has him convinced that moving is a waste of time, has him trapped in this imperative _now_. He’s caught somewhere between the weight of his desire and the limits of their bodies, and he realizes before long that they’re gonna have to move if this is going to be good.

Need is taking the front seat to nerves, to inexperience. This isn’t enough, he can barely do more than get his mouth around the head and it’s not _enough_. He barely strings two words together and grinds out a “go on” that comes out in one sound as he gives a guiding push where he wants him, stretched out flat on his back on the brown leather, all that pale skin in stark contrast.

“God yer pretty...” Brad can’t help it, the words tumble out of his mouth in a rush before he can think better of it.

There’s a look on Orville’s face that’s hard to read with the mask, hard to fill in the blanks, to go off of the curve of his mouth, the part of his lips, the longing in those blue eyes. It’s the edge of a smile but it’s deeper and it’s lost and Brad is far too far gone to be stuck too long in piecing it together. All he knows is the small smile behind parted fringe and the invitation of his body, parted legs making space for him to follow Orville down.

So he does, awkwardly and careless as to how he looks, half on the sofa and half-off, ungainly if they were being watched. His big hand rubs up Orville’s lean thigh as he fits himself in there, squeezes and kneads the muscle as he drags his face up along his inner thigh, lips grazing sensitive skin. He smells like soap and skin and focusing on his body like this helps his brain shut off, helps him blot out the mess that trips him up and lets him get lost in his skin.

Somewhere above him comes a surprisingly shaky exhale as Brad’s mouth and beard drag upward, nosing into the crease of his thigh just enjoying the scent of his body before his hand comes up to grasp him, guide him to his lips. He finds him and figures it out, letting exploration guide his hands and mouth.

There’s something about the sweet ones, earnest and unassuming, the ones you could almost pass on by because they’re not obvious, not trying to be edgy; pulling them from their shells never fails to pay off. Never fails to light a fire in him, to rise the heat under his skin as the good-guy gives way to something else, awkward and eager to please.

Orville watches as Brad maneuvers an arm under his leg, gipping the top of his thigh as he shoulders it in a bid to get closer, take him deeper, push the limits of his capabilities chasing what he’s spent the last six hours fantasizing about.

Longer than the last six hours, if he’s honest.

“Do you want to fuck me?”

The question comes in a moment when Brad cast a glance up the length of Orville’s torso, past all that bare skin laced in ink, as their eyes meet. Brad has to move to respond, Orville’s cock falling from his lips with a soft, wet sound that somehow he doesn’t hate.

“Yeah,” he says fast, and then, “I mean, yeah. Do you?”

“Only all fucking day,” Orville says with a laugh, hand flying up to catch the back of the sofa, pulling himself up. When Brad doesn’t automatically move he nudges the side of his head with his thigh, bends the other leg, and bumps his knee against the larger man’s chest, the message clear: get up, _move_.

He’s clumsy when he does, practically falling over himself getting to his feet, slamming into the coffee table in the process, causing the open bottles of kombucha to lurch dangerously, but thankfully they don’t fall. Orville’s up just as fast and following Brad the short distance to the bed. They don’t make it before they’re touching again, before Orville catches Brad by the shoulder and turns him, stops short before they reach the leather bench at the foot of the bed and kisses him again this time standing.

Brad’s taller even with boots on, and barefoot, without the heel to boost him it’s more pronounced. He has to lean up to catch his mouth, and just like that the two brain cells Brad had managed to rub together to move from the sofa to the bed are gone. Orville, on the other hand, doesn’t stop moving; hands at his shirt working open the buttons and when Brad manages to catch back up to speed and help, Orville lets his hands drop down to the waist of those gray pants, the last offending layers between them.

“Can’t tell you how much restraint it took not to just let you fuck me in the cooler.” The words come filthy as they part, as Orville’s hand steals a cup and a squeeze, humming his approval at feeling how hard he is already. He bites his lip as he gives it a good, solid stroke through the fabric and lets that full, kiss-swollen lip escape his teeth as he lets out a hiss of breath, a soft “ _fuck_ ” as he looks down between them.

“Jesus,” Brad’s voice breaks and he somehow slams into that low bench without managing to go anywhere and grunts at the impact, feels like an animal caught between a lead and the wall of a pen, and Orville’s on the other end of the rope.

“I can’t wait to feel this dick inside me,” he breathes, soft, possessive. He’s edging into Brad’s space, angling him backwards, leading him around the bench to the bed.

_This dick._

Brad feels on tilt, feels overwhelmed, bowled over and he _needs something to ground him_. He grabs for Orville, hands curling into fists in his shirt.

They’re in a wordless negotiation, hands and bodies and the space between. Brad loses his shirt with help, and he doesn’t get a chance to fight his way out of his open pants because Orville sinks to his knees to do the job for him. A hand still bunched in the cotton cut-off, Brad tugs Orville’s shirt off over his head, leaving him kneeling naked at his feet wearing just the mask, laces askew.

Orville pulls Brad’s pants and boxers down in one swift motion, all the way down to his calves and he’s careless when he leans in — doesn’t use a hand to guide him to his mouth, just chases the bob of his thick cock open-mouthed as his hands move to urge Brad to step out of his pants and shoes, hears the soft sound of them scuffing over the floor.

Pants gone, Orville’s free hands sweep up the length of Brad’s legs, around the backs of his thighs, cupping under his ass and squeezing, drawing him in, sucking him down, and a big hand lands square on the top of Orville’s masked head for balance as a rush of Jersey accent sputters out a short string of filthy half-words.

Orville couldn’t wait to be laid out to get that cock in him, needed a taste too, a preview, an appetizer. But enough’s enough, and he pulls back with a wet pop and rocks back on his heels, looking up at Brad through the leather of his mask. He doesn’t have to say anything.

“Get on the bed,” Brad manages, a crystal clear command.

Orville’s on his feet in an instant, but he’s not obeying right away, makes a detour first to the open dopp kit on the nightstand and pulls something from inside and tosses it down on at the head of the bed: a travel sized bottle of lube and a condom.

Orville turns to face him like there’s an edge of doubt, like he thinks there’s some chance that when he’s faced with that--with the reality of what they’re doing--that nerves will get the best of him, and he’ll falter. But it doesn’t come, at least not the way Orville’s afraid it might.

“How d’ya wanna do this?” Brad asks, struggling to wrap his mind around the mechanics, at more of a loss with most of the blood in his body diverted south. He’s asking for help, for guidance, for more than just the position of their bodies.

Thankfully, Orville catches on.

“Follow my lead,” he says, voice heavy and deep, grounding. “Don’t overthink it.”

Brad nods, feels the weight of Orville’s voice wash over him like the tide rolling in, warm and swirling and dragging him under. It’s easy to let go with Orville taking the lead, with slim hands finding bare skin, urging him to follow him down. And down he goes, his big body eclipsing the singer’s smaller frame. As they move and settle in the center of the bed, they get distracted in each other, the kiss stretching out longer than originally planned, their bodies negotiating space again, this time with room to spread out.

Orville is so worked up that kissing doesn’t go on long before he’s writhing beneath Brad in the bed, twisting his slender body to get in a better position to get what he wants, thighs spreading in obvious invitation, heel bracing hard against the mattress, eager to grind. It’s not enough, and when he’s got to surface for air he throws out a hand to find the little bottle and press it into Brad’s hand. After a beat and a breath, he gives instructions, explicit and deliberate.

“Get your fingers slick and give me one.”

“ _Fuck_. Yeah, okay,” Brad is reeling. He can’t believe this is happening, can’t do anything but give Orville exactly what he wants, especially when he asks for it like that, not really asking but demanding, voice deep and low and bigger than his body.

Orville’s already feeling around for the condom, wants it ready when they’re ready. He hears the soft click and a squirt, and he adds, “Middle finger. Slow, but... not too slow, just—”

Brad’s already starting to follow those instructions, slick fingers fumbling between them, finding his entrance inexpertly, and it’s _that_ that stops Orville talking, cuts off the directions he’s giving. The thrill of having done something that was enough to get a reaction like that from Orville, even one so small, is intoxicating and Brad doesn’t waste time in letting his middle finger start to sink in. He’s rewarded when Orville’s breath hitches.

“Like that?” Brad asks, voice soft so he doesn’t miss a thing.

“Yeah,” Orville swallows and stares up at him, blue eyes locked together.

Brad’s hands are bigger than his, fingers thicker, and that long middle finger sinks in deep. Orville moans deep in his throat and shifts, spreads his legs wider — open invitation, making room.

He hasn’t quite recovered enough to remember that he’s got to give the next instruction, so lost in how good that first finger feels inside him for a moment, that Brad beats him to the punch. His finger curls slightly, rocks, and it shouldn’t be as good as it is considering how fumbling and amateur the move is, groping blindly, but it _is_. He doesn’t know why and he doesn’t look at it too hard, some mix of chemistry and sheer idiotic lust and delayed gratification strung out over six-plus hours.

“Like that,” Orville says with an enthusiastic nod, urging him on. “Thrust, yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Mmhm.”

Orville’s hips are moving. He’s chasing Brad’s hand because it’s not enough, _not enough,_ and he’s losing his mind. They both are.

“Another, c’mon,” Orville instructs, demanding. He knows his body, knows what he can take, and tempting as it is to call it here and move on to the main event, he knows Brad’s thick enough that he needs that second finger.

When Brad obeys, Orville arches beneath him and takes it. It’s a stretch and it’s a hint of what’s to come, but he wants more, now. He nods encouragement, approval, a wordless confirmation that it’s good, he’s doing a good job, exactly what he’d asked because he can’t find his voice in that moment, so overwhelmed with everything and the thought of what’s coming.

Brad’s pressing open mouthed kisses to Orville’s collarbone, nuzzling in there, somehow everywhere at once, big enough that he covers him over.

“You feel so good,” Brad’s voice is almost unrecognizable. Dazed and soft, like the words are an offering or a confession.

Somewhere along the way, Brad’s hat had come off because it’s gone now, Orville’s hand fisted in his messy curls like he’s holding on for dear life, anchoring Brad in place to keep his mouth there, keep the heat and whisper of him right there against his neck and ear where he wants him.

“Fuck me,” Orville’s voice is rougher, raw with need. He practically forgets about the condom until he moves his other hand at Brad’s back and hears it crinkle, feels the wrapper drag against his skin.

If Brad had more sense or experience, he’d argue for more time spent preparing, but he has neither and he trusts Orville’s guidance and his knowledge of his body, so he moves. All at once those fingers are gone and the loss is overwhelming, and Orville groans. Taking back his hands, Orville races to rip the condom open, helps it on in a show of dexterity, using his whole body to get Brad where he wants him and frankly it’s impressive as hell, leg wrapped around him, heel hooked on his thigh to urge him up on his knees, high enough to reach. When he’s got it on he finds Brad’s hand and urges him to touch himself, spread all the lube still covering his fingers over his cock. Orville feels around for the little bottle and gets more in his palm and takes Brad’s cock away from him, takes over, smears more down the length of him.

Brad’s silently grateful for the condom for more reasons than just the obvious, glad for the slight dulling of sensation, hoping it keeps this from ending before it’s even begun.

As he’s sinking in, he feels thicker than Orville had anticipated and he’s reacting, body on autopilot. He brings his legs up and coils them around him at once in an effort to ease the stretch and tip the power dynamic. Brad may be on top, he may be fucking him, but Orville has his heels planted and digging into the small of his back urgently demanding _more._ Stubbornly refusing to let the sink be slow, needing it fast, _now_ , needing the first stroke over with so he can recover. So he can settle back into his skin and refill his lungs and call the next shot, orchestrate it, like a conductor leading with rhythmic motion.

“Ohmygod,” the words are thick, Jersey, breathing hot against Orville’s neck, between the leather of the mask and his cheek.

He’s overheated and he needs air he can’t get because he doesn’t need it in his lungs but on his skin. If he’d been thinking he’d have figured out how to handle the mask before all this started, but the reality is, despite what one might think, things haven’t gone _this far_ with anyone else since he’d started to go by Orville. That’s not to say things haven’t happened, mouths and hands, casual, but this is new territory since the shift in his public persona.

He arches as Brad sinks inside him, as their bodies come together, neck stretching out long and gorgeous and flushed with arousal and heat as he takes it and _squirms._ Brad feels rather than sees the way he twists beneath him, head turning to one side, so overwhelmed — but then he sees, because the mask is slipping. What he can see of his face is cast in sharp relief in the low light of the room, mouth with lips parted, the full line of his nose, eyes covered by the bunching of leather and fringe.

“Unnhhh, _fuck_ ,” the words grind out of Orville. If he’d thought that was it, the end of that first stretching thrust, he was wrong because Brad does something then, finds purchase on the bed or shifts the angle of his hips and bottoms out, the force of it rocking Orville’s body on the bed.

“ _Ohshit_ , yes.” Orville’s voice is different, then, foreign, slurred. In that moment, he can’t remember why on earth he’s got a leather mask on his face and all he knows is it’s too much, too warm, that it’s in the way of getting air on his hot skin and blocking his view of the man who’s fucking him. So he pulls it off, gives it a careless toss like it means nothing at all.

Orville’s hair is a sweaty mess from the mask, golden brown and cut short. He’s staring up at Brad like he doesn’t realize what he’s just done, all flushed with arousal, lips all bitten and red, eyes watering because it feels so fucking good.

That’s the first he sees of him — really sees of him. This is the look on his face when he sees it for the first time, features etched with pleasure in the moments after their bodies connect. Brad’s stuck in that moment, frozen and drinking him in, the shape of his face and the way his eyebrows frame those intense blue eyes. It’s a shock to his system, jarring beyond words when his mind catches up to the moment and he realizes that he’s fucking a man whose face he’d never seen. A man who’s real name he didn’t know. But in this moment, none of that matters because this is more than names and the things either of them put on to build an identity. It didn’t matter that it could be seen as one sided, could be seen as half-anonymous, because the truth of it is more raw and real than Brad’s ever experienced.

Orville’s watching Brad watching him, eyes scanning over his face in turn, and realization dawns slow. When it does, when he’s capable of thought enough to know what he’d done in taking the mask off, it’s clear he doesn’t care, that he hadn’t let Brad in accidentally. He’s the one to break the stillness of that moment first, heels digging into Brad’s backside like he’s nudging a reluctant horse to move and when he can reach he leans up to capture his mouth, to kiss him.

“Oh God—” Brad starts when they part, the words breathed against those full lips, but Orville won’t have it and shuts him up by stealing another kiss from him. Brad doesn’t get the message. “Orv...”

“Shut up and fuck me, baby.” The demand of it’s broken with the softness of calling him baby, and he doesn’t know which of it had done the trick, but it had because in the next moment Brad’s giving him what he’d asked for.

He’s moving, fucking him, and he’s watching him because he can. Because he’s been let in, he can see behind the mask and the persona and he can see the expressions pass over Orville’s face like clouds across a wide open sky. He never wants to stop looking, doesn’t want to blink because it means losing a second of this.

Orville lets out a sound that’s wordless and guttural and he coils his legs tighter around Brad’s body, and then squeezes rhythmically to guide him like he doesn’t trust him to give him what he needs. Like he can’t give up the reins and let their bodies figure it out together. Brad comes alive under Orville’s lead, lets himself be guided by the dig of his heels, the flex of his thigh, learns what he means by each when he responds and Orville reacts. And he lets go, stops thinking too hard about it and just moves. It takes them a little while before their bodies start moving in conversation.

They’re both panting from exertion, moaning more often than not, and the irony is that while earlier in the walk-in it seemed like Brad never shut up, here it seems like Orville can’t.

“Mmm… mmmm, fuck yeah,” Orville practically growls, biting his lip as the sound registers low. He’s making eye contact, bright and direct and Brad almost feels held pinned by it.

Orville knows what his voice does to Brad, knows that with every intentional dip into that lower register that it’s a crack of the reins. And it’s effective, does what he hopes it will, he feels the lurch between them as Brad tries to fuck him harder.

“Oh yeah,” Brad’s voice sounds of disbelief, still shaken by the reality of it all.

“Harder, just like that,” Orville manages, head thrown back as he continues, “Fuck baby that’s so good, your dick feels so fucking good, don’t you dare stop.”

Orville’s rambling and he knows it but he doesn’t care, he just needs Brad to keep on what he’s doing, just exactly _that_. It’s fucking perfect, just exactly what he needs.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Brad whispers the words between them, face soaked with sweat when Orville catches his mouth for another sudden kiss they can’t hold more than a few seconds.

It’s Orville that breaks away, suddenly overwhelmed and twisting beneath the larger man like he’s about to crawl out of his skin he’s getting it so good.

“Slower slower,” he gasps suddenly, “I wanna feel every fucking inch of you.”

Brad stammers something like ‘Guh’ as he slams to a halt and the next thrust comes slow and deliberate and the sound Orville makes right then is inhuman, he just fucking keens his pleasure out feral. Brad’s sure he’s going to come then, is shocked that he doesn’t, thankful for the condom and the change of pace both helping keep him this side of the edge.

“Fold me in fucking half.”

Orville doesn’t elaborate, but there’s a shift between them then, a flex of his thigh that sends a message and Brad fills in the gaps. Figures it out. Grabs Orville’s thigh, hand under his knee, and pushes it up flush against his chest. The difference then, how much tighter Orville feels for it takes him by surprise.

“Fuck,” Orville echoes back, it’s all he can manage; it feels like Brad’s splitting him open.

“Holy shit,” Brad gasps and repeats, breathless, “Holy _shit_.” His big hand squeezes the underside of Orville’s thigh as he fucks into him again, still slow, sweeps around to the front of his thigh and uses it as leverage as they keep moving, pick up speed. Orville reaches for him, pulls him in for a kiss, hand at the back of his head and needy, and Brad abandons holding his thigh to catch himself against the bed, letting that leg hook over his shoulder.

“Fuck, slow down baby, you’re gonna make me cum.”

“Fuck,” Brad’s brain melts at the thought of that and he tries, steels himself, slows, but it’s shortlived.

They’re too breathless to hold a kiss long, but it doesn’t stop them from trying back and forth, like the distance between them is intolerable if it lasts too long. They carry on stealing kisses they can’t keep and Orville breathes praises into the space between them, urging him on, telling him exactly what he wants and how good it feels, all of it from inches away. So close Brad’s nose slips sweaty over Orville’s as he tells him again, _yes_. As each thrust comes deliberate, their bodies working together like an engine, so far gone and so lost in each other that they’re in lockstep. The wet slap of their skin picks up because Brad can’t keep it slow, not when Orville’s looking at him the way he is, not with the sounds he’s making.

“I’m gonna,” Brad tries and falters, starts again, “‘m gonna come.”

“Yeah, yeah...” Orville breathes, nods, hand fitting between them as he finally grabs hold of his own aching cock, desperate for just that much more so that he comes in time with Brad, and it’s a race. It’s almost too much, almost more than he can take, but _god_ he’s needed exactly this all fucking day and he just fucking needs this. It’s some combination of the quick pace of his hand chasing orgasm, and the sudden surge of hard, staccato thrusts as Brad lets himself take exactly what _he_ needs to come that does it for him, and he comes with a shout.

Brad’s not far behind him, that first splash of Orville’s come on his belly setting him off and it’s all over. He comes amidst groans and soft, repeated “oh fuck”s, staring down at Orville’s upturned face, at the flush and the ecstasy etched in his features. The timing is almost perfect, Orville able to ride his orgasm out while Brad is swept up in his. When he lands on the other side of it, breathing hard and limbs heavy, hand falling away from between them, overstimulated, Brad’s collapsing over him, the solid weight of his body blanketing him as he chooses a kiss over catching his breath.

They have to part for air and Brad laughs and gasps for it, lips drawn in a big goofy smile and Orville helplessly, easily echoes the laughter.

“Fuck,” he grins and manages to take another kiss from Brad who hadn’t quite been ready for it, kissing the chef’s grinning mouth.

“Mmhm,” Brad’s laughter is delighted and giddy, and in between he manages a kiss here and there before breaking again into a toothy, blissed-out grin. But then he’s gotta breathe and he’s gotta move, and so he does, shifting, one hand down between them as they part so that he’s sure to take the condom with him.

Collapsing on the bed beside Orville, he lets out a whooping sound, conveying elation and god knows what else, and then he’s laughing again, still breathless. The condom disposed of, he just lets himself fall back on the bed, heavy.

“Fuck,” Orville scrubs his hand over his face, raking his fingers through his messy hair and then looking over at Brad. “That was fucking, just, incredible.”

“Yeah?” Brad asks, seeking validation.

“Yeah,” Orville’s voice punches up in emphasis, and he simultaneously elbows Brad in the side. “Of course it was.”

Neither of them have caught their breath yet but Brad rolls to close the distance between them anyway, kissing him again, all giddiness and elation. He swallows up a satisfied hum from the singer and answers it with his own.

“Let’s order tacos,” Brad says after he pulls away, settles back down beside him shoulder to shoulder. He’s exhausted from the exertion, the adrenaline-high energy of it still ripping through his body, and he’s starving. He could entertain another round, but he needs the energy to fuel it.

“I fucking knew it,” Orville laughs.

“What?” Brad’s grinning over at the man beside him, at Orville, his attention lingering over the lines around his eyes that crinkle up when he laughs. He’d never noticed them before, with the mask on. “I’m starving.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it, I just coulda called it. When I headed in earlier and passed the restaurant downstairs, I knew that if you showed up here, we were going to order tacos after.”

“ _If_ I showed up?”

“Yeah, well, I hoped you would but I wasn’t sure.”

“You _hoped_ I would,” Brad repeats it, the glee audible in his voice, like he’s wearing that admission like a badge of honor. He can’t believe that Orville hadn’t been absolutely sure.

Orville gives him a shove out of nowhere. “No, I just blew you in a fridge, gave you my room key and rode back to my hotel with a hard-on and hoped you’d reject my invitation. Of course I hoped you would, you moron.”

“Well, I dunno! I know, I just,” Brad sort of flails his hands around, gesturing, “You’re _Orville Peck_ and I’m just—”

“Oh, stop. You’re not _just_ anything.”

Brad’s not one to take that kind of compliment well, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with it, but he knows enough to let it be even if it’s uncomfortable for him. It’s just one more thing on top of the _a lot_ from tonight, and he’s not sure how much more he can process today.

“So would you have a taco if I ordered some?”

“Oh fuck yeah, I’m starving. I was just giving you a hard time,” he grins over at Brad and shifts, turning onto his side and watches as the taller man proceeds to contort around so he can lean off the bed and grab some edge of his discarded pants and pull them close enough to the bed that he can snag his phone from the pocket. A picture of elegance and grace. Orville isn’t sly about ogling Brad’s ass.

With it retrieved, he’s back and settles down beside Orville, and as he flicks the screen open he catches sight of him biting back a smirk at the very slick phone grab he’d just witnessed.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he insists, playing it innocent as he shifts a little closer, adjusting how he’s propped up with his hand against his jaw. “I just didn’t realize you were a phone fisherman.”

Brad reflexively breaks into a grin and a soft hoot of a laugh escapes as he throws an elbow out playfully, “Noodling.”

“Oh, fuck,” Orville says, laughter erupting at the mention of noodling. “That was incredible. I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve watched the noodling episode _multiple_ times.”

“You _scoundrel_ ,” Brad says, scandalized as he opens Seamless and types in _Casa Bocada_ and finds nothing. A few more fruitless taps, and he hums a perturbed _hm._

“You sure that’s what it was called?”

“Yeah, hang on,” he says, exiting the app and typing into the phone’s search bar to find _caviar_ instead, an app that tends to have better selection depending on where in Manhattan you are and what you want to order, and once he centers it to their location, _Casa Bocada_ is right at the top. “Bingo.”

“Hell yes,” Orville leans in against Brad’s shoulder to get a better view of the screen as he starts to scroll through.

“Tell me what sounds good,” he says, taking his time to read everything. Down to the tacos, he’s humming hungrily as he peruses the choices, “We could order a couple and split them.”

“Absolutely.”

“Mmm, carne asada... oh, wait, that’s got cotija.”

“That’s fine,” Orville insists, just like earlier, and just like earlier, Brad is nothing if not accommodating.

“No, let’s figure out a compromise. How does the tacos al pastor sound?”

“Hell yeah.”

“Hell _yeah,_ ” Brad echoes emphatically and adds an order to the cart and goes back to the menu. “Calabacitas tacos... oh, no, that’s cheese.”

Orville exhales half an affectionate laugh, so charmed by how thoughtful Brad is being about his dietary restrictions that he can’t bring himself to tell him he doesn’t eat meat other than fish, for fear he’ll nix the tacos and go veggie all the way.

“We could get the chicken.”

“Sounds amazing.”

“Awesome,” he says, adding that as well and back to scrolling. “They’ve got street corn.” That’s how it’s listed on the menu, street corn instead of elote.

“I’m not interested unless it’s got instant vinegar in it.”

“Instant vinegar?” Brad’s laughing as he says it, incredulous. He feels giddy, young and dumb.

“Just add water.”

“ _Dehydrated_ vinegar, you rube!” Brad rolls in Orville’s direction with half a mind to smother him, but what he does instead is kisses him to shut him up. Orville complains as soon as he sees it coming, falling back on the bed like he thinks he can escape and hollers a weak _help!_ but he’s not trying to escape real hard because soon enough, Brad’s half on him, kissing him, the taco order almost forgotten.

Almost.

“Mmm... you minx, you’re distracting me.”

“You’re blaming _me?”_ Orville sounds scandalized, blinking up at Brad, the picture of innocence. “You attacked me. Called me a rube, tried to crush me.”

“A likely story,” Brad says with a grin as he shifts just enough that he’s laying on his side now, half against Orville, curled against his side, and picking up his phone he lets it prop against the singer’s chest as they return to the menu. “Oh, they’ve got empanadas. Have you ever had empanadas?”

“I love them,” Orville says emphatically. That’ll work just fine, he’ll help himself to empanadas and let Brad tuck into the tacos properly like he knows he’s dying to do.

“Let’s get that, then, and the salsa sampler.”

“Jesus Christ, man, have you eaten at all today?”

“Whoa, hold up on the judgment there, bud, I missed lunch.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” Orville puts on a sympathetic tone, and the conversation shifts playfully, “How did that happen?”

“This masked cowboy corralled me up in the walk-in and came on to me.” Brad can’t help the way his cheeks round out as he explains the source of his lunchtime troubles and good God does he look cute as hell.

“Oh, wow. That sounds harrowing. What did you do?”

The two of them are on a dangerous path, and Orville already feels himself starting to get attached. Matters aren’t helped by Brad’s response, by the way his eyes crinkle easily despite trying to suppress a laugh, and he comes back with a put-on over-confident reassurance of, “Oh, I handled him.”

Orville laughs outright, his disbelief obvious. “Oh, you _handled him_ , huh?”

Try as he might, and he tries hard, he can’t think of something clever to say in response. Not with those sharp blue eyes trained on him, no longer hidden behind the mask, and Brad feels the newness of all of this really hit him for the first time, the uncertainty of it. The feeling of being out of his depth and just flying by the seat of his pants isn’t something that’s new for him, it’s part of how he’s propelled himself through life, but here, with this, as the moment shifts from action to playfulness and now dips into silence, it’s catching up with him. He flushes pink to his ears, smiling shyly, helplessly as he looks down at the phone in his hand, flicking through the cart, wondering if he should add notes for the courier.

“Hey,” Orville tries again, voice softer, more soothing, “I’m just teasing you...”

“No, I know, I ju— this is, it’s new for me and I’m, I—” and just like that, the floundering, awkward Brad is back, stumbling over his words, “I joke and I talk a big game, but I, yaknow. I spent the day second guessing everything in the cooler and wondering if I didn’t come off like the biggest idiot.”

“No,” Orville answers quick and insistent, eyes soulful and earnest. “No, not at all. Not even a little bit.” After a beat, he concedes and adds, “I mean, inexperienced, yeah, but an idiot, no way. And I’ll be honest—”

Brad’s watching Orville’s face, ignoring his phone screen, unaware that it’s seconds from going dark under his hovering thumb.

“—I really like showing you the ropes,” he finishes, landing a kiss to the corner of Brad’s mouth, one he turns into and takes, one he deepens. His face is still hot with a mess of feelings he hasn’t quite shaken off but there’s this undeniable spark between them, their bodies quick to find each other, moving magnetic.

“Mmmyeah?” Brad asks against Orville’s lips, mid-kiss.

“ _Oh_ yeah,” Orville’s voice lifts and swings low, interest and promise rolled into one. His slender hand moves over Brad’s bare chest and the wiry hair, the softness of his body a counterpoint to his own lean, hard lines. Orville fits himself against him like they hadn’t just finished fucking five minutes earlier, thigh slipping between Brad’s as he folds their bodies together.

“Mm,” Brad surfaces from the moment enough to remember... something. He was doing something. His stomach protests loudly, and he latches onto that and remembers: _food_. “...you’re distracting me... from tacos.”

“You wanna see a distraction?”

Every fiber of Brad’s being wants to say yes, except for the growing hunger that’s grumbling in his belly, but it’s not enough to make him speak up before Orville’s got a hand between them, wrapped around his not yet softened dick. He groans because it’s a lot so soon but also because there’s a part of him that’s awakened and _wants_ even if he’s not sure he’s capable of it going anywhere.

“...the tacos...”

“Fuck the tacos,” he’s growling as he moves so he’s up and hovering, his hand still _there_ and working, heedless of the cooling, mostly dried and sticky mess of Brad’s cum, a few strokes and flicks of the wrist and he’s rock hard in his hand and Orville needs to feel it inside him again.

“Orv,” Brad protests weakly, and fuck if Orville doesn’t love the way his name sounds in Brad’s mouth. “I don’t know if I can, y’know, come again. So soon, I mean.”

“Do you want to stop?”

“Fuck no.” It’s a bad decision and one he’ll likely regret, but he’s never been great at making the smart decision. There’s absolutely no hesitation here, because despite the _too-muchness_ , there’s an awakened need that Orville’s stoked like a fire burning in him. He was helpless against it from the second he’d come back down, kissed his mouth, reassured him that no, he didn’t think he was an idiot, that he’d enjoyed the cooler every bit as much as he had.

Brad barely has the words out and Orville grins up at him, eyes bright with equal parts mischief and raunchy lust.

“Good, because I’m not done with you yet.”

Brad’s not unwilling — far from it — he knows he can’t come so soon but he doesn’t care because he’s hard again, still hard, whatever, and he can tell what direction this is going and there’s no way in hell he’s saying no. He’d have to be insane to. But, in the seconds afforded him by Orville moving to stretch over to the nightstand to fish a second condom from his bag, Brad realizes he’s working against the clock and grabs his phone and hastily adds a note to the order, full of typos, asking the courier to “callb atthe doort,” and taps on to the final screen, clicks to add the maximum automatic tip, 18% or $9 on top of their $61.94 order and clicks on through to place it.

Orville’s rolling the condom onto him before the notifications appear through the top of the screen to confirm it and he exhales a grunt through his nose and drops the phone, watches Orville chase the condom down with a slick hand, another too-soon stroke.

They get to it fast, Orville moving to straddle Brad’s hips without preamble, guiding their bodies together with his hand between them and then he sinking down on him. Both men groan, and on the inhale Orville raises up again, hips rolling. _Too much._ Brad’s hands find Orville’s thighs, the space between index finger and thumb spanning his slender hips like he means to guide him back down but for now it’s passive. For now, he lets Orville set the pace, can’t handle more than what he’s getting, what he’s being given.

“Shit, you’re deep,” Orville breathes as he chases the idea of settling all the way down on him, slow to let Brad bottom out again. It’s deeper like this, he feels fuller like this, and it’s so fucking overwhelming.

“Fuck,” Brad squeezes the tops of Orville’s thighs fitfully, needing to touch, to feel, to distract from how overwrought he’s feeling. Hands rub over Orville’s slender belly, over the tattoos that line his ribs, touching him like worship.

He’s blindsided when one of Orville’s slim hands guides his down low over his belly, pushes in, urges him to feel, and offers up a suggestion Brad hadn’t even considered, “Can you feel your dick through me?”

“Shit fuck,” Brad twists beneath Orville, reacting like he’d been shocked, but Orville doesn’t let his hand go. He holds it there against him, makes him feel. Brad doesn’t know, he doesn’t know if he can, but the sheer thought of it is too much. He must be slipping, getting lost because Orville digs his heels into his sides like he’s a wayward horse and pairs the move with finally fully sinking down on him all the way and Brad can’t help but buck up against him.

“ _Yes,_ ” Orville catches his balance and shifts side to side like he’s trying to take him deeper somehow, and he lets his head fall back as he lets go, stops thinking. He’s just moving, a live wire reacting to touch and the spark of his nerves, hips rolling, twisting, breathlessly chasing exactly what he needs, the precise grind and shift that brings Brad’s cock against him over and over _just so_. They stay locked tight together once Orville finds it, the sweet spot, and settles into more a grind than anything, a subtle lift that’s all thighs and ass, raising himself up just enough to keep the sensation rolling through his body.

More than once he has to stop, has to pause, just for a second because it’s so much it hurts, but stopping is worse and he starts up again, gasping and breathless, Brad beneath him making these lost and broken sounds he’d pay to be recording.

Brad thought there was no way he’d come, thought, judging from past experience, from any time he’d gone for a second too soon on the heels of a first, that he was in for a longer ride and one that definitely wasn’t going to end in release but he’s wrong on both counts. It blindsides him when it happens out of nowhere, one second so much it hurts and the next second he feels like the dial’s been wrenched to fifteen and somehow the way his body works has been overridden and he’s _coming._ Inexplicably, he’s coming like the feeling’s being ripped out of his body and it’s good but it _hurts_. He’s never come like this in his life, never come dry, never had his brain so firmly offline. It feels like he might be about to black out, like when his eyes slip closed he can’t open them again, and when he manages it, his vision is screwed up and blurred.

“Oh fuck,” Orville gasps as he watches, taking in everything he can through his own haze of _too much_ and he grabs hold, hand tight on Brad’s wrist, fumbling for his hand, needing something to hold on to and he’s babbling because he’s lost too, half-careless as what he’s saying, “Fuck yes, oh God look at you, you did so good, baby, fuck...”

And right there, right then, as if on cue, there’s a knock at the door and on the heels of it, Brad’s phone starts to ring on the bed beside them.

If it had the power to snap Brad out of where he is, it doesn’t. He’s aware of the commotion kind of distantly, but more imminently he’s aware of Orville still moving on him, holding his hand tight and using it like reins, using whatever hold on him he can get for balance and leverage.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Orville hisses, aware of the door, the phone, but desperate to get off in spite of it. “I’m so close, don’t stop, fuck yes, _fuck_ , just like that.”

What is it that Brad’s doing? He doesn’t know and later can’t remember, but whatever it is that Orville doesn’t want him to stop has him coming apart at the seams, has those slender thighs shaking as he struggles to keep moving. He’s riding Brad hard and he’s loud, head thrown back, muscles straining beneath pale skin stained splotchy pink and glistening with sweat. He’s an obscene vision, the embodiment of a different kind of cowboy.

It’s not until the end, not until he’s so close that the risk of not coming tips the scales and makes touching himself when he’s this oversensitive feel worth it that he takes the head of his cock in his hand, and he’s coming in barely a stroke.

Brad can feel it from the inside, from beneath, can feel the way he stops moving because he can’t anymore, a combination of muscles clenching and trembling and limbs giving out after that headlong sprint to the finish.

“ _Chee_ -sus,” Brad hisses as Orville comes messily over his belly for the second time tonight, watching him through still-blurred vision as he rides his orgasm down, muscles in his belly twitching, chest heaving, eyes screwed shut tight.

Neither of them have caught their breath yet and another knock comes to the door, the third or the fourth.

“Hang on... just a second! I’ll,” Orville manages to holler and stops short, breaks into an elated laugh as he leans down, presses a breathless kiss right to Brad’s mouth, hands clapped on both cheeks and shakes him, smooshing his cheeks pseudo-aggressively before he pulls back with an overly enthusiastic _‘muah!’_ sound, sitting back up awkwardly on Brad’s dick, and both men groan.

“Oof,” Brad’s hands rest on Orville’s thighs in silent encouragement to move, but his brain is still too offline to make it happen.

“Sorry, sorry,” Orville murmurs, hands on Brad’s belly for balance as he lifts up and moves off him.

Brad makes another wordless sound of complaint and laughs weakly as Orville lingers just long enough to lay an approving, affectionate slap to his flank before starting to make his way towards the door, finally finishing the sentence he’d started, loud enough to be heard through the hotel door. “Be right there!”

For all his talking a big game and the _attaboy_ vibe of the swat to Brad’s side, watching Orville now gives a glimmer of a different story, hints at the fact that Orville’s fucked-out whether that’s something he’d wanted to let on or not, not so steady on his feet as he hunts around for something to put on. What he comes across first is Brad’s denim shirt and he pulls it on, not bothering to do the buttons up, just holding it closed with one arm like a robe before making his way towards the door.

He’s practically swimming in it, the sweep ending well below his ass. Watching Orville in his shirt does something to him, lights something possessive in him, but he doesn’t know quite what. He knows what this is, isn’t naive enough to think this is the start of something big, but try and tell that to this part of him that wants to wrap the singer up in his big arms from behind and tackle him back into bed to fit the shapes of their bodies together.

Brad doesn’t notice it, but Orville must have found his wallet on the way, because when he answers the door and takes the bag of food he passes the man in the hallway a bill and takes a second to thank him profusely for not just leaving. Orville might be clothed but only barely, and it’s beyond obvious why neither occupant of the room had gotten to the door on the first or second knock, nor answered the phone. The courier seems unimpressed, but pockets the bill and thanks him, tells him to have a good night, and is gone.

Door locked again, Orville comes back over to the bed with the bag and sets it on the bed next to Brad’s elbow. Brad’s paying more attention to the way his open denim shirt covers nothing of Orville when he can’t hold it closed than he is about the food. Not that he’s complaining, he’s just surprised, given Orville’s new fame, that he’s not more concerned about being seen like this than he apparently is. But, again, he doesn’t have the capacity to get those thoughts out into words.

As if Orville can read his mind, and maybe he can, given the way Brad’s boring holes through his body with those soft blue eyes, he murmurs, “No mask, I’m just some naked kid in a hotel room.”

 _Kid_. Is he really, still? Identity gets muddy inside of thirty, and the shift in public persona complicates it more. The mask and everything, becoming Orville Peck had given him this kind of timelessness, lets him explore where he fits and how, lets him move away from _kid_ even though, in many ways, he still feels like a kid, chasing the next good time, and feel out what it’s like to take up more space. To be grander than he ever has been, to fill in his blanks with enough gravitas to give this authenticity.

Brad _hmms,_ because he’s got a point, and because they’ve broached the mask — and finally have recovered and stopped fucking long enough to try and talk — asks, “Is that okay?”

Not that he’s got real brain power back for conversation.

“That the mask came off?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. Of course it is,” Orville sits down on the edge of the bed, leg curled beneath him. “It’d be kind of... I don’t know, strange if it hadn’t... for you,” but for him too, he thinks.

“Yeah, yeah... just—” Brad doesn’t know what he’s saying.

But Orville thinks he kind of does. He knows because he’s said, he’s made a point in interviews, addressed the questions about who he is and what he looks like behind the mask. He’s said to wonder is missing the point, to want to strip Orville Peck away and look for a different name is to ruin the magic of it. But this is different.

“ _Listen_ ,” Orville starts pointedly, the intention being to rescue Brad from floundering, because he can see it all over his face that he’s agonizing over how to get out the words he wants to say. “I had intended to take it off somewhere between the sofa and the bed, I just got a little distracted. And besides,” he adds, maybe against his better judgment, “it’s not something that’s come up, y’know, since I started going by Orville and wearing the mask and the whole nine.”

Unsurprisingly, his meaning goes right over Brad’s head at first, judging by the absolutely blank expression on his face.

So he says it bluntly.

“I haven’t been with anyone in a long time.”

Embarrassed realization dawns over Brad’s face and he laughs around his response, “ _Oh_.”

“Yeah.”

“Duh, shit... sorry, I’m, feh—” he sighs and gives up on words. Or, should have, considering what he adds is, “You fucked me stupid.”

Orville laughs outright at that, eyes glittering with delight as he shoots back with, “ _I did?_ I don’t think you know how fucking works.”

“Aw, shut it,” Brad laughs and gives Orville a playful shove, “You know what I mean!”

“I honestly don’t!” Orville makes a show of swaying with the shove, looking scandalized before he launches into a gay sex-ed lesson with, “I don’t know if you’re aware, but when a lumberjack-lookin’ chef likes a hell of a lot of a punk cowboy’s instagram posts, sometimes if they’re very lucky, the cowboy’s agent and the kind folks at Condé Nast orchestrate a video collab—”

“Shut up!” Brad’s laughing loud, deep belly laughs and swatting vaguely in Orville’s direction.

“—that opens the door for the chef to fuck the cowboy.”

“Alright alright, I know, I fucked _you_ , but you fucked me stupid.”

Orville lets out the biggest, dramatic sigh and slumps his shoulders and slouches comically, one laugh percolating out of him, and it sets Brad off laughing all over again.

“We just went over this,” Orville says between Brad’s bawdy laughs.

“Fuck!” Brad erupts finally, exasperated and too fucked out and hungry to think anymore, “I need tacos.”

“You might want to...” Orville gestures vaguely downward as he pulls the bag towards himself, and it’s in that moment that Brad realizes that he’s still wearing the condom.

“Oh man, thanks,” and try as he might, he can’t help but feel a little foolish for not realizing it for so long. He can’t help it. There’s something about Orville that steals every available ounce of his attention like a moth to the flame, and he just gets... stupid. He elbows his way to sitting up and peels the condom off and it’s quickly disposed along with the first one, but they’ve got finger food and he’s a fucking mess.

“I’ll be back, gonna wash up,” Brad says, realizing fast that he has no idea where the bathroom is.

“You know, that’s a good idea,” Orville leaves the bag and follows after Brad, looping an arm around him and pressing a big kiss to the side of his face as they go.

“...at the same time?” Brad sounds uncertain. He’s wading into a lot of new waters today, but the one he’d maybe expected the least was that he’d be sharing cleaning up in a bathroom with a man he’d just fucked. He’s not even sure just why it’s that weird, it’s not like he’d never taken a leak while a girl he was dating washed her hands, and he’s definitely used the men’s room while other guys used the urinal alongside him.

“The bathroom’s huge. Unless you don’t want to,” Orville says, very aware of and accommodating to the newness of all of this for Brad. Brad’s thankful for it, but at the same time it pushes him to think. Being afforded the space to think and feel and experience this means being vulnerable, means looking at things head-on that he’s never before had a reason to scrutinize.

“No yeah,” Brad says, “It’s fine.”

“No yeah means yes?” Orville picks good-naturedly as they move into the large and brightly lit, black and white tiled bathroom and Orville goes to the far sink and turns on the taps. Pushing too-long sleeves up his arms, he pumps soap into his palms and washes his hands.

“Yeah,” Brad chuckles, finding the ease again as he takes the second sink. Clocking himself in the mirror as he turns on the faucet, he looks wild. Naked, hair askew, still flushed ruddy. His gaze shies from himself and he steals a look over at Orville. Orville wearing his denim shirt. “No yeah is yeah, yeah no is no.”

“How on _earth_ does that work?” Orville asks, looking up at Brad as he unfolds a washcloth, gets it wet and wrings it out before scrubbing it over his face and then back through his short hair a couple of times and gives it a toss down on the counter, ruffling his fingers through his hair. _That’s better._

“Yer asking me how words work, now?” Brad laughs and decides the washcloth idea is a good one and does the same, lingering a little longer than Orville had with it pressed to his face. Brad’s cloth is cool because he needs it, and he sighs into his hands through the terrycloth.

“You’re right,” Orville’s voice comes from closer than Brad expected, and he startles as the singer rests his chin on one shoulder, hand grabbing hold of the other for leverage, and ducks his head to place a kiss where his chin just was, and he’s fighting an impish grin as he adds, “how foolish of me to ask you questions that require brainpower after I just fucked you stupid.”

Brad laughs a loud _ha ha!_ laugh and rocks forward, catches himself on the black marble countertop before he swats at Orville and, not connecting, turns around so he can find him and catch him. “You get oudda here with yer _semantics_.”

“Oh! Semantics! That’s a big word coming from someone who—”

“Someone who what!” Brad exclaims more than asks, and he’s grinning ear to ear as he catches Orville around the middle from behind and noses a kiss against the back of his neck.

“Who, uh...”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Brad’s chuckling but he lingers there because it feels right, and he layers another kiss over the first, and he could stay here all night long. They both could, but the growling of Brad’s stomach interrupts. He exhales over the shell of Orville’s ear, gaze flicking over the side of his face, the line of his jaw with a few days worth of stubble and has this distinct feeling that he’s already in too deep.

“I gotta get some of them tacos in me or I’m gonna eat’cha alive,” Brad croons against Orville’s neck, laying one last kiss to the place where it meets his shoulder. This one’s deliberate like punctuation, like a period at the end of a sentence and just that final.


	3. The Revenge of Pant Dick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brad makes a big claim he can't back up, and gets called out. Orville reflects.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANKS AGAIN TO BETA @nectarine-migraine of tumblr / nectarinemigraine of ao3 for beta-ing. This wouldn't be half what it is without her help!
> 
> Thanks also (still and again) to @soho-x of tumblr / sohox of ao3 for tolerating my endless yammering about this. 
> 
> Also big thanks to the couple of folks in the comments who've drifted over to share things with me on tumblr -- you guys are dope.

**December 19, 2019**

10:45 PM CDT

**Orville**

Commando for six years, huh?

**Brad**

Oh yeah

100%

**Orville**

Huh that’s funny, because I definitely remember you wearing underwear

At least till I took them off.

A new _It's Alive_ had premiered that morning with Brad making fish jerky, and it had ended, to Orville's delight and suspicion, with Brad making a big deal about going commando for six years unless he’s dressing up. Orville’s calling bullshit because he’s seen behind the curtain. He knows the truth.

It’s evening in Nashville and Orville has just finished watching it, stretched out on his hotel bed with his phone propped on his chest, and as soon as the video ended he’d promptly flicked over into his message app to find his and Brad’s chat history, ready to start giving him shit for talking a big game about supposedly going commando _._

They’ve been texting more days than not in the three months since that first night at the end of September they’d spent fucking until they could hardly walk, Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash playing softly in the background, too wrapped up in each other to breathe. Whenever he thinks back on it, he thinks of it as the first night rather than the only; there’s something about this that’s so different from one night stands he’s had in the past, and it has his mind filling in the blanks with the imagined next time and the next.

He pulls inspiration from the things they hadn’t gotten to yet, despite putting forth an admirable effort to experience as much of each other in one night as possible. There’d been another round in the morning before Brad left for work, and he’d gone in late, freshly showered and wearing the clothes from the night before. Orville can only imagine the stir that must have caused in the test kitchen among those who’d noticed.

**Brad**

You must be mistaken

Brad Leone definitely doesn’t wear underwear. ever

Maybe Brad Leon does

**Orville**

Ohhhh that explains it

I guess it was Brad Leon that fucked me, then

**Brad**

Must be

Orville can just imagine the reaction that remark got — calling him _Leon_ , another nod to that first night _—_ the secret smile that surely crossed his face then, the way his eyes twinkle when he laughs.

The fact that he thinks about him as much as he does should be a sign to put more miles between them because he’s not as young and dumb as he once was. He knows how this goes. It’s a song he’s sung before, and if he were smart he’d jump the chorus and save himself but he’s already in way too deep, has been since the start. For better or worse he’s here for the ride, even if that means they’re riding for a fall.

Since that first night Orville’s been to Denmark, Germany, Spain, Portugal and back to the US, Nashville and Miami, up to Toronto and out west again before he’d found his way back down to Nashville. The band’s wrapping things up before the holidays hit and everyone heads back home. It’s got him busy, running around like crazy but at the same time affords him a little more downtime in the evenings than he might usually get.

After the holidays it’s Australia and then it’s promotional appearances with an odd smattering of one-off shows, and then his spring tour starts up in March. He’s been keeping an eye out for a time they could bridge the distance in person instead of video calls, looking for a good excuse to meet up again but between their schedules it’s been damn near impossible.

But still, he tries.

**Orville**

Think I could get that recipe for pant dick?

**Brad**

Sorry bud. Proprietary recipe.

I signed an NDA, no spoilers

Next week on It’s Alive

Pant Dick

**Orville**

Oh come now. I couldn’t get a sneak peek?

**Brad**

What’s it worth to ya?

**Orville**

Hmmm…

Orville stages and snaps a picture for Brad, a (not so) little _pant dick_ of his own. The image is artful. He snaps it from a downward perspective, phone resting on his bare belly to steady the shot. He’s still mostly in his clothes from the day, white skin-tight pants that already leave very little to the imagination, but with the way he’s got a hold of himself through the front of them, there’s absolutely no question as to what he’s working with. As if Brad didn’t know.

He’s all stretched out on the hotel bed, the gaudy jewel-toned duvet a backdrop behind him. Blurred out in the background of the shot beyond crossed ankles and black boots is a low wooden dresser and a mirror; enough of him is caught in the reflection that Brad will be able to see he’s half-undone — mask, hat and shirt gone.

He hits send.

Afterward, there’s a silence long enough that he half wonders if Brad set the phone down or had gone to bed. But he clearly hasn’t, because after the lull he replies.

**Brad**

How’d you get my pant dick recipe Big Boy?

I’m calling my lawyer. I’m gonna sue

Orville exhales a half-laugh through his nose — _what a dork_ — and taps his phone to begin to type, and as he does he can see Brad is on the other end typing too, the ellipses coming and going a few times. Orville’s quicker at the draw.

**Orville**

Oh yeah? This your recipe?

**Brad**

Oh yea

**Orville**

Prove it

Put your pant dick where my mouth is

**Brad**

jesus fuck why arent you here?

Where are you

?

**Orville**

Nashville

**Brad**

Goddamnit

**Orville**

I’m headed up to NYC tomorrow

4 days

If you’re free maybe we could... compare recipes

That’s a thing you people do right?

**Brad**

Hell yea!!

I think you mean like swap tho. recipe swap

**Orville**

Oo I like that better

Lets swap.. recipes

**Brad**

You still just lookin for pant dick or you want some other recipes

I got some good shit you might like

**Orville**

Oh yeah? like what

**Brad**

i mean i got a buncha ways to get real good meats

**Orville**

I’m listening

**Brad**

dry aged

cured

ground up in sausage

**Orville**

omg lol

**Brad**

Too weird huh hahha

**Orville**

You’re deranged

Come on

I sweetened the deal, where’s my sneak peek

The next text that comes through from Brad is his own variation on the theme of pant dick. He’s at home in bed too, navy sheets pushed off his legs. He’s wearing blue plaid pajamas, not flannel because he runs hot and at night he’s a furnace. This pair’s seen enough wear that the crispness has been all but washed out of the thin cotton and the worn buttonhole has lost hold of the button; Orville thanks his lucky stars for that because it affords him a delicious glimpse of what this conversation’s started to do to him.

Brad’s hand is curled near the elastic waist and his thumb is just hooked underneath, and it’s not hard to imagine how easy it’d be to peel those pants right on down.

The shot offers hints at the room beyond, but Orville doesn’t notice that until he looks at the photo again the next day at the airport, opened from his camera roll while he waits at the gate for his flight to board. Then, he notices the big traditional oak dresser beyond the foot of the bed, stuff haphazardly piled up on top. It’s got a homey feel, lived in, messy. It’s something Orville doesn’t have the luxury of much these days, moving hotel to hotel — and before that, motel to motel when they weren’t doing as well as they are now — and needing to keep his things pretty well contained so he’s ready to check out and move on to the next city on the map. It’s something he misses sometimes.

**Orville**

That looks like a.. real good recipe

think I could try it while I’m in town?

**Brad**

i think i can pull a few strings

sure you’re not interested in any of the other ones?

**Orville**

you mean the innuendo that sounds like you wanna pickle my dick?

lol no I’ll stick with this one

It’s getting good reviews with the testers

**Brad**

Oh is it now??

**Orville**

Mhmmm

There’s a little gap of time before Brad texts again, and in that space Orville scrolls up through their messages to re-read what Brad had said, the quick and enthusiastic _hell yea!!_ in response to inviting himself to visit, hopefully to stay a night or two. It’s endearing, the way Brad’s typing deteriorates even more than usual when he’s blindsided with the mere suggestion of what Orville wants to do to him. He recalls an older conversation, one they’d had a couple weeks back, where he’d ended up failing to type so spectacularly between his big thumbs and trying to type one-handed that it had jump-started a move from dirty texts to dirty calls and finally to FaceTime.

His place in the conversation jumps so he scrolls down to the bottom, watching the ellipses of Brad’s typing flicker and disappear before the next message lands.

**Brad**

what about breakfast?

**Orville**

Brad Leone, are you inviting me to spend the night at your house?

**Brad**

what if i was?

**Orville**

I’d say I’d love to.


	4. The Fish Collars and the Floor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Orville has some engagements in NYC in the few days before Christmas, and gets a chance to share a couple of nights with Brad in Jersey. This is the first night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual, massive thanks to soho-x and nectarine-migraine for cheering me on (soho) and being my beta (nectarine). It's no small task! I am a mess! BIG thanks to nectarine-migraine for this being as crisp as I feel like it is in its final form — she def helped me clean this chapter up. <3

**December 20, 2019**

11:57 AM EST

**Orville**

I’m in your time zone

**Brad**

Where you at ?

**Orville**

LaGuardia

**Brad**

I’m so sorry

**Orville**

Fuck man, don’t I know it. LGA is a hole

**Brad**

Wait i thought you were coming into Newark

**Orville**

Was gonna but we got a thing at 2 in midtown, then the gang is headed to the hotel

And I’m headed to Jersey

**Brad**

Oh right ok

Jersey huh ? why Jersey of all places ;)

**Orville**

Got a big recipe swap to attend. Brought my best pant dick. Gotta aim to impress.

**Brad**

hey woah hey now careful

i’m in the kitchen an they’re filming

can’t have pant dick here now

**Orville**

oops sorry

Might have to pass on some of the recipes he wants to swap tho... sausage and dry aged steak... as much as I love me a good [REDACTED], I don’t really eat meat

Like, actual meat

**Brad**

Wait what ?

**Orville**

Yeah. I’m pescatarian

**Brad**

Wait how am i only hearing about this now ?

what about the tacos tho

**Orville**

You were starving and I couldn’t bear to shoot you down again.

I was afraid you’d just substitute everything with veg and starve

**Brad**

you could have said !

you ate one ! Were you ok?

**Orville**

I was fine! Really

Don’t worry

**Brad**

omg you're killing me

i’m glad you can’t see my face rn

**Orville**

?

**Brad**

pretty sure the heartbreak is written on my face

I had steaks all bought and ready to go

**Orville**

Oh no!

Oh no I’m so sorry

**Brad**

Ok new plan, you like hamachi?

**Orville**

Yes, but if you don’t wanna have to cook more after cooking all day we can just order something. I feel bad about the steak

**Brad**

i want to cook for you tho

I’ll pick some stuff up, do some grilled fish collars and like a salad or somethin

sound good?

**Orville**

It sounds great.

**Brad**

for real or you just trying not to hurt my feelings?

i can take it. Nothing can hurt me after learning you don’t eat meat

**Orville**

It sounds amazing. Want me to pick anything up on the way into Jersey/

?

**Brad**

don’t worry about it, i got it under control. Just bring you

**Orville**

Will do 🤠

“So, what, you just stopped off at the bodega on the way out of Manhattan and picked up some fish collars?” Orville smirks and sits on one of the tall bar stools, elbows on the wooden counter, so he’s got a good view to watch Brad cook and keep him company.

“ _Bo_ dega,” Brad repeats, mimicking the way Orville said the word and laughs to himself, eyes cast downwards as he moves ingredients around. “No, I mean, come on, what do I look like? I can’t feed _Orville Peck_ just any old store bought fish.”

“Oh, _stop_ ,” now Orville’s laughing, and having just had a sip of his beer he presses the back of his hand to his mouth reflexively. He’s gotten so used to the mask in the past several months that sometimes when he’s not wearing it he feels exposed.

“I went to my fish guy.”

“Your fish guy,” Orville grins at Brad like it’s a joke and he’s waiting for the punchline. Like Brad doesn’t _actually_ have some personal hookup with some fishmonger somewhere in Manhattan.

“Yeah, my fish guy,” he says, nodding sincerely but it comes off comedic. “I gadda fish guy. I also gadda beef guy,” he punctuates what he’s saying with a wag of a knife before putting it back down on the tall cutting board, “and as it happens, I’ve got like $120 worth of dry aged rib-eye in the fridge there, except _somebody’s_ a pescatarian.”

“I’m sorry!” Orville feels bad but still he’s smiling because he’s so charmed by all the effort Brad’s put into showing off for him. He wishes he’d thought to tell him a while back that he doesn’t eat meat so he hadn’t spent all that money for no reason, but it doesn’t change the fact that he just finds it all so painfully endearing.

“I should pay you back. I’ll pay you back. That sucks and I’m sorry,” Orville says, putting his beer down and rocking to the side to pull his phone out of the butt pocket of his jeans. “You got Venmo?”

“No, c’mon,” Brad laughs and waves him off, “I’m just funnin’ ya. It’s fine. It’s gonna get eaten, it’s no big deal.”

“No but I feel bad about it. Come on, let me send you half anyway. I didn’t bring beer or anything, and you’re opening your beautiful New Jersey residence to me—”

“ _Residence_ ,” Brad hoots a little laugh, unable to stop himself from mimicking Orville’s little turns of phrase.

“—days before Christmas, hitting up all your meat dealers for that good shit—”

“Meat dealers!” The more Orville talks, spinning bullshit, the more Brad’s struggling to keep it together. Brad’s struck by the sudden image of standing out on the street corner trying to score Japanese Wagyu A5 on the black market, and at that he’s lost the ability entirely and practically collapses, bent double over the wooden countertop and quaking with laughter.

“—when you could be, I don’t know, letting stuff go bad in very specific ways to your heart’s content all weekend.”

“‘Ey whoa there cow-buckaroo, now you’ve gone too far, I don’t let stuff _go bad._ It’s called fermentation—” Brad’s getting ready to launch into a full blown explanation of just what exactly fermentation is (and truth be told, Orville hadn’t been too far off) when Orville cuts him off.

“Now you’re just trying to change the subject. Come on, humor me. What’s your Venmo?”

“Nuh uh,” Brad says, and at the nudging expression Orville offers up in response — like a non-verbal _come on —_ he mimes zippering his lips shut.

Orville rolls his eyes and makes a sound, _oh_ and this dismissive fart noise with his mouth as he slaps his phone down on the peninsula, face down. “You’re _absurd_ , you know that, right?”

“Takes one to know one.”

“What are you, twelve?” Orville mirrors Brad’s big dumb grin as he picks his beer up by the neck and takes a swig, pushes up off his bar stool and walks around the peninsula.

Brad reflexively looks over his shoulder at Orville as he sidles up alongside him, doesn’t quite know what to make of it or what exactly he’s doing. Does he wanna help? Orville sets his beer down again and leans on the counter, not unlike he had in the test kitchen a few months back when they were filming: _s_ houlders up as he leans in on his hands folded together, drawing attention both to the dip of his collarbones and the shape of his body. Brad sees now what he’d seen then, what he’d wondered at, agonized over, but now it’s not a question because he knows — Orville’s flirting with him.

Looking back he’s surprised that had ever been a point to question, given everything that had happened after filming wrapped. It’s hard to believe that realization had ever been news, and yet it was. And it still is now, today, in his cramped Jersey kitchen. It feels somehow unbelievable to think that Orville Peck is here of his own free will and interested in him. Someone ought to slap him for his continued disbelief, especially given the content of their text messages over the past three months.

“Only on the inside,” Brad’s plugging a food processor into the wall near the peninsula.

“What’s that for? I thought you were doing fish.”

“I’m mixing up sambal. It’s for the fish,” Brad explains as he pops the top and starts adding in the chiles, shallots and garlic along with salt and cane sugar.

“Sambal, doesn’t that...?”

“Yeah, usually it’s got shrimp, I’m not putting that in.”

It occurs to Orville that he could have easily picked up a jar of sambal and saved a great deal of time and effort in making this dish, but instead he’s making it from scratch to keep the spirit of the dish and the flavor as intact as possible. He is utterly charmed.

“Hey... c’mere,” Orville leans into Brad’s space and interrupts him in the middle of what he’s doing and presses a kiss to his mouth, the first of the evening. Parting, he adds a soft, “Thank you.”

“What for?”

“For being so thoughtful. It means a lot,” he takes another kiss and lingers there, slow to pull away — Brad’s mouth tastes like citrus and ginger — and when he does he hums, “Mmm... what’re you drinking?”

Brad’s a little bit slow to respond to Orville’s question, because he’s caught up thinking about that kiss and the thank you, the sweetness of the moment threatening to overwhelm him out of nowhere. He’s been so unsure of where he stands with Orville, wondering what on earth he could possibly see in him, that this hits him like a ton of bricks. He rallies, but it takes him a second or two before he can respond.

“Goose Island... some wheat ale. Did a spot for ‘em, they sent me off with a bunch’a cases. This recipe, actually.”

“Oh, yeah? You mean somewhere online I can watch you making exactly this dish?”

“Yep,” Brad grins to himself, looking down at the ingredients and then back up over at Orville sidelong. “But, y’know, here you got a front row seat.”

“Yeah, this is way better,” Orville agrees readily.

Brad just looks over at him with this big, earnest smile and Orville realizes that he’s not going to win here, Brad’s not going to take any money for the beef in the fridge. Not content to let it go, Orville decides to voice an idea which, if he’s being perfectly honest with himself, he’d had a couple weeks back when his agent started conversations about the event in question.

“I think we're doing a thing at MoMA in a few months. I can get you a few tickets. As a thank you.”

“A few...” Brad feels his heart sink in his chest at the offer, reading into it the suggestion that Brad should bring a date. “Who would I bring?”

Orville picks up on the source of Brad’s concern. He knows at some point they’re going to need to have a realistic conversation about what it is they’re doing here, but right now he selfishly wants to ignore all the many particulars about both of their lives that make it a challenge for this being more than long distance peppered with the occasional night together when they’re in the same city. Besides, right now it’s still new, and they’re just trying it out to see how it feels.

“People from work?” Orville suggests, and follows it up with, “I _hoped_ you might come as _my_ date. I sort of thought afterwards we could roam the streets... look for your fish dealer...”

Brad can’t help the reflexive little laugh, but it’s short lived because he’s focused so much on what Orville had said. _I hoped you might come as my date._ What does that even mean for them? Right now, though, now he’s not overthinking it. He can’t. It’s not really in his nature to. He can’t get much past the thought that keeps playing over and over in his mind that Orville has just asked him on a date. Well, sort of. To _be_ his date at a show, to pal around after. Except, less like pals and more like dates.

“I’d like that,” Brad says with a nod, fighting to keep his smile from going all big goofy grin and losing that fight pitifully. He ducks his head in a last ditch effort to hide the look on his face before he gives up and leans over, and this time he’s the one to initiate a kiss.

Orville manages somehow to angle himself in there, edging between Brad’s body and the wooden counter, and leans away barely enough to talk without their lips brushing, “Yeah?”

“Mmmyeah,” Brad answers, grinning, nose to nose with the singer as he steals his way back to kissing him. On another break for air and banter, he adds, “...it’ll give me an excuse to get all gussied up. Y’know, show off a little’a the ol’ pant dick.”

And with that the mood of the moment is absolutely shattered; Orville has to fully turn away or risk laughing right in Brad’s face, and as he does he grabs his arm for balance. Or, more truthfully, just for an excuse to be touching him.

“I will be _furious_ if there _isn’t_ Jon Hamm Mad Men-esque pant dick action at my show,” he manages when he’s able to get words out without laughing.

“Yeah?” Brad chuckles and picks up a garlic and tosses it back down, forgetting where he’s at in the recipe with how distracted he is by Orville.

“Yeah,” Orville can’t stop grinning at him and shaking his head. He’d caught that, too, that nod, the reference. Brad had tried to play it so cool in the video that had aired yesterday with his casual _doesn’t that guy from Mad Men always have pant dick going on?_ As if he didn’t know. That’s the kind of thing you notice when you _notice_ that kind of thing. Well, in Orville’s experience, anyway. He’s not wholly sure how straight men go through life not constantly aware of and distracted by each other’s dicks. If he’s honest, he suspects they’re no more immune than he is.

Glancing down at the food on the countertop, he decides maybe the best course of action is to let Brad focus so he doesn’t completely short-circuit him yet. So he asks, “So what all goes into this?”

“All’a this stuff,” Brad says with a chuckle as he pushes up one of his sleeves. “We got the fish collars over here, they’re gonna need some time on the flat top here and we gotta get the spoon sauce mixed up.” He’s gesturing to the ingredients that are out, either sitting out on the counter or in little bowls ready to go.

“How many cloves of garlic go into this recipe?” Orville asks with just enough of a tone of suspicion that Brad can’t help but give him a Look.

“I thought you liked garlic,” Brad responds, guarded, like he’s suddenly not quite so sure he trusts him if he’s calling his garlic into question.

“Yeah, but...” Orville tips his head to the side in unspoken commentary, like he doesn’t even need to finish the sentence to get across what he’s trying to say, like it should be obvious.

The look on Brad’s face as he crushes the three cloves of garlic in front of him says it’s definitely not obvious. “But what?”

“You put like a half a cup in the sambal already.”

“Yeah, and?”

“And?” Orville’s voice lilts up in amused incredulity, “ _And_ I’m sorta hoping to get laid here tonight. I’m gonna reek.”

“Well, you’re in luck then, babe,” Brad answers with a bright, cheeky grin, “I’m gonna reek too, so I’m not gonna notice you stinkin’ of garlic.”

“Oh thanks, that’s really reassuring.” Orville laughs. It’s not the first time Brad’s slipped a _babe_ into conversation with him, but it is the first time it’s happened in person. He hops up on the far edge of the peninsula, legs dangling, bare heels bumping against the steel support down below. Here he’s got a better view of what Brad’s doing, or something like that. Really, it’s just an excuse to put himself a little bit in the way. To be a distraction.

It’s working if the steady flush in Brad’s face is any indication. With the garlic crushed, he does a dice on it and comments, “I dunno about you but it’s kinda romantic, workin’ up a good garlic sweat together, y’know.”

It’s maybe the raciest thing Brad’s said without provocation or without being already in the middle of something, and Orville absolutely latches onto it.

“‘Working up a good garlic sweat’?” Orville asks, the sheer giddy joy visible on his face as he echoes Brad’s words back to him and watches him go even redder for it.

Brad tries and fails to ignore the aftermath of what he’d said and press on with the recipe. He drops the garlic into a small bowl and tries to focus on chopping the ginger, but he can tell Orville isn’t going to leave this be.

“Yeah, I mean, y’know. Like you do.”

“Oh, okay. ‘Like you do _,’ excuuuse_ me, I should have known — it’s a whole _thing_.”

“Oh _come_ on,” Brad’s blotchy red under the scrutiny of it — it doesn’t help that Orville’s perched up on the counter looking down at him — but he’s good-natured about it, grinning, can take a ribbing at least as good as he gives it.

“You’re gonna have to show me how all that goes,” Orville says, stretching a leg out towards Brad’s, rubbing his foot over whatever he can reach of his thigh.

Brad seems to somehow go redder, and Orville delights in watching how it’s spreading to his ears.

“Now?” Brad sounds strangled and a little bit pubescent, voice cracking like this wasn’t something he’d done before, something he’d bargained for, or even something he’d seen coming. “I still got, y’know, the spoon sauce together, and the fish and everything.”

“Oh, don’t mind me,” Orville plays innocent. “I’m just saying hi.”

The sweetness of the sentiment seems to jar Brad out of his nerves and he looks up at Orville with a smile and answers, “Hey.”

Brad’s got an innocent streak a mile wide and it doesn’t fail to be thrilling as hell because he’s seen beneath it, knows that underneath the puppydog exterior there’s another side to him. One that yearns, that sends him dirty messages and dirtier pictures late at night, that more than once has called him in the middle of jerking off to get a little _inspiration_.

Orville should take it easy on Brad, and he does for a little while. Brad mixes up the sauce, adds ginger to the garlic and then measures white miso and soy before he's dipping into the food processor to get a little scoop of sambal for the mix.

“Do you eat eggs?” Brad asks seemingly out of the blue, realizing suddenly that he might have taken that for granted like he had with meat.

“Yeah, I do. Is there eggs in this...?” Orville asks, confused, and leans back on his hands counter, striking an inviting pose as he looks over the spread of ingredients.

“No no, I’m thinkin’ about for breakfast tomorrow,” he says, spooning some honey into the bowl and reaching for the olive oil.

“Not enough to be cooking one meal, you’ve gotta be thinking about the next one,” Orville doesn’t fight the little smile that flickers across his face.

“Heck yeah, bud. I’m a hungry boy,” Brad grins up at him and pivots to check on the temp of the flat top, hovering a hand over the surface. When he’s back, he’s adding the last couple of things to the small bowl and giving it a vigorous stir before going for a spoon to get a taste and hums his satisfaction audibly.

“Oh man,” Brad chuckles to himself, happy with how good it is. It’s just the two of them, so he doesn’t bother going for a clean spoon, just dips it into the bowl again before offering it to him. “You gotta try this.”

Orville doesn’t take the spoon from him, but instead leans in and lets Brad feed it to him, holding eye contact as he takes the spoon in his mouth to taste. There’s nothing objectively sexual about it, but somehow between the slow wrap of Orville’s lips around the spoon and the way his attention dips down to follow the line of Brad’s gaze as he sucks the sauce from the spoon and lets it go, there absolutely, undeniably _is_ something very sexual about this.

“Mmm...” Orville hums obscenely, eyes closing in pleasure.

Brad’s starting to sweat.

“Good, right?” he asks, feeling the heat rising in his face and dear God he’s not sure if they’re going to manage to eat before the night takes a turn here. Between the heat the flat top throws off and Orville perched here on the counter like some kind of sex nymph hell bent on distracting him from cooking, it’ll be a wonder he doesn’t blow the kitchen right up.

“ _So_ good,” Orville says, and reaches over to dip a finger in the bowl, wanting another taste.

“Ey, oh!” Brad complains with a good natured swat. “No fingers in the sauce.”

“You double dipped! It’s no different,” Orville shoots back as he pops his finger into his mouth and fixes Brad with a devilish grin.

“Is too,” he argues back. “The spoon was only in my mouth. Your finger, God knows where that’s been.”

Orville laughs at that, rocking back with it, and concedes, “Isn’t that the truth.”

“It’s _spoon sauce_ , not finger sauce,” Brad complains and tries to squash down a grin, trying to look disapproving and failing miserably.

“What is it that’s so good?” Orville asks, deciding to play ball and grabbing the forgotten spoon and dipping it in, letting the sticky sauce coat the end before popping it into his mouth again. “Is it the sambal?”

“Probably,” Brad says, not sure just what it is Orville’s picking up on and liking. It’d make sense if it was, though, considering he wouldn’t have been able to have it before, given the fact that it’s usually got shrimp in it.

Brad takes the plate of fish and turns to the stove where he’s got the flat top set up and lays the collars out, satisfied with the sizzling sound they make as they touch down.

“Oh yeah baby,” Brad says, talking to himself or to the fish more than he’s talking to Orville.

He pushes at the fish with his fingertips rather than grabbing tongs as he arranges them how he likes. When he turns back he’s got a mind to start making the salad to go with the fish, but on his way past Orville to go wash his hands, he gets stopped. Orville stretches out a leg to catch him like a roadblock, hooking that leg around him easily and drawing him in closer.

“Ey, I got fishy hands, you gotta lemme through,” Brad isn’t even really complaining because he’s found himself suddenly tucked between Orville’s spread thighs, those long legs coiling around his and it’s far too easy to get distracted, lost in this. He’s holding up his hands, fingers curled like he’s trying to remember not to touch stuff till he washes them, like he can’t use them till he gets to the sink and Orville uses that helplessness to his advantage; he pulls him close, hands fisted in the fabric of his shirt to haul him closer.

“Luckily I don’t need your hands right now,” Orville coos as he leans in and catches his mouth again.

“Yeah, but—” is about all Brad manages before the rest of the sentence is lost in the hollow of Orville’s mouth, his weak complaint that was going to go something like _yeah, but I do._ Orville’s pushy and insistent like he was last time, and he’s seductive and inviting, but in turns he suspends it and lets it all slow down. Maybe it’s to see what Brad does in response. It feels like fishing, like Orville’s casting his line and letting it sink to the bottom and waiting for him to bite, making Brad work to show his interest. Dear God, it’s maddening that he gives just enough and lets it start to slip away, makes him lay himself bare. As if it were a secret in the first place just how badly he wants him.

Orville’s pulling back under the guise of finally letting Brad have what he was after, the space to go wash his fishy hands, but Brad stops him with teeth catching his lower lip, tonight’s first hint that he might harbor desires with rough edges.

It stops Orville in his tracks, shivers stealing down his spine at the hint of possessiveness he’d felt surfacing in Brad and he leans into it in search of more, but it’s not something he can chase because as soon as he does, Brad goes soft and slack like a mind gone blank. Like when Orville’s doing the thinking and the pursuing it frees Brad from needing to.

There’s a seductive rhythm to this, dark and deep but playful at the same time; it’s like a game and they’re taking turns between who’s casting a line and who’s waiting to bite, swinging between extremes, playing keepaway. Neither of them have the brainpower to surface from it until the sound of sizzling gets loud enough to snap them out of how wrapped up they are in each other.

“I gadda…” Brad sounds dazed as he searches for words, barely far enough from Orville that he can talk without their lips grazing. “Fish.”

“Mmm… ‘kay,” Orville concedes, allows him to pull back, but not before pressing another soft, chaste kiss to the corner of his mouth.

Brad tries to follow it reflexively, but the sizzling of the fish is his anchor to the world and he manages somehow to pull back. It’s evident that it’s not easy from the way his eyes drag heavily down the front of Orville's body before he turns.

Taking up the tongs he gets to flipping the fish, and he’s so glad he’d gone with the more forgiving collars because it means they’re in less danger of burning. He’s pushing them around the flat top and turning the heat down just a touch when he’s suddenly aware of _something_ between his legs, friction rubbing his jeans and it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that it’s Orville’s foot.

“Frig,” Brad blurts, startled, suddenly _so_ _aware_ of the slight pressure nudging his balls and conscious of practically nothing else. The tongs fall out of his hand and land with a loud clatter on the burners beside the flat top, and thankfully that side is off and cool because he goes for it without a thought.

“Is the fish ready?” Orville asks, putting on a voice that sounds calmer and more collected than he has any right to be with what he’s doing to Brad with one outstretched foot.

“...Orville,” Brad says his name with such feeling it stops Orville in his tracks, the ball of his foot and the instep ghosting down along Brad’s inner thigh and falling away, not wanting to push this too far. Much as he’d like to be irresponsible here, push this relentlessly, there’s dinner and a stove here, and he doesn’t want to risk injury or ruining dinner just to prove he’s capable of being a shit.

Through it, he can’t tear his eyes from Brad’s hand nearest him, clenched in a fist and pressed against the countertop beside the stove like he’s trying to will himself back under control, and failing. Orville has never wanted so badly to push the last threads of someone's self-restraint until it broke in his life, but he doesn’t. Not yet.

“I, uh…” Brad is scrambled, grasping at the straws of his thoughts, and looking down at the fish as he tries to remember. “Needs some sauce. While it, uh…” he gestures at the fish and turns back towards the peninsula Orville’s sitting on, but doesn’t look up at him. Can’t yet. He needs air, needs to breathe, needs just one blessed second to collect himself so he doesn’t burn the kitchen down trying to fuck Orville in the middle of a half dozen tiny bowls and assorted knives and ingredients.

Once the fish is sauced and he’s successfully slipped past Orville to wash his hands, he comes back to his spot at the peninsula by the big cutting board.

“You like, uh, lemon? I thought I’d, y’know. Salad. Toss up a salad, little lemon. Vinai— gruh… what?”

Orville’s leveling Brad with a grin like he’s planning to eat him alive — to hell with the fish — and Brad looks utterly deer-in-the-headlights clueless about what’s going on. Had he missed something?

“I’ll toss your salad,” Orville says with mock-innocence that couldn’t possibly have fooled anyone.

Yet Brad still looks confused, blinks down at the salad fixings in front of him, trying with whatever amount of brain power he’s got left to make heads or tails of what Orville’s saying.

“I mean, if you wanna… it’s just arugula and fennel, but without a mandolin it’s gonna need a real fine chop— what?” Brad hears Orville’s helpless little snort of laughter and blinks at him. Poor Brad, most of the blood in his body is headed south and he doesn’t have enough left to even try and guess what he’d missed.

“No, I’m sorry,” Orville backtracks fast, completely incapable of controlling his laughter and big dumb toothy grin in the face of Brad’s innocent confusion. It’s such a novel change to be with someone who’s mind doesn’t automatically go to the filthiest connotation of whatever’s being said. That’s not to say Brad’s innocent — he’s not by a long-shot — he’s just sometimes a little dim, and he’s definitely not at Orville’s level of filthy. In the past that would have been a bad thing maybe, or at least might have been seen as boring, but in the past Orville had operated on a different agenda. He’d been looking for a good time first and foremost, but priorities change. At the age Orville is now and the _person_ he is now, Brad’s wholesome naivety and this untapped well of desire lurking beneath the surface is… thrilling.

“Whudd’I miss?” he insists, standing there at the cutting board with a hard-on, a little knife in one hand and fennel in the other, looking utterly lost.

“Nothing, nothing… you can toss the salad for both of us tonight. I’ll take notes and toss one tomorrow.” Orville looks like he’s fit to burst with secret amusement.

Brad just stares back at him, eyes narrowing, palpably confused.

“Are you makin’ the salad dirty somehow?” Brad asks, starting to catch on but not knowing just how. As he asks, he’s gesturing between the two of them with the knife and slowly — and carefully — starts to do a fine chop on the fennel. Not his best work, but he can hardly be blamed.

“Me? I would never.” Orville is _scandalized._

Brad can’t help but smirk at Orville when he looks like that, playing pretend like he’s insulted, but he tries to squash it down and keep the confused disapproval a little longer. “You best watch it, bucko. If I find out you’re makin’ a mockery of my salad, I’m gonna— oh frick, what _now_?”

Orville almost breaks into a laugh but catches himself, fingers gripping the live edge of the counter as he rocks forward. “Nothing! I wouldn't _dream_ of doing anything in front of your salad.”

Brad looks suspicious as hell, but he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be noticing in what Orville had said that he should be taking issue with, so he gets back to chopping sarcastically slowly.

The salad mixes up quickly once he’s got the fennel set, and just a splash or two of olive oil and some lemon zest and they’re almost there. Squeezing the halves of the lemon over the salad, he seasons it with some salt and pepper and they’re done. _Except_.

Brad goes for the salad tongs to give it a toss and stops dead in his tracks and looks at Orville, who is sitting stock-still on the counter doing his absolute best to control himself, but he looks so close to breaking it’s driving Brad nuts.

“For Pete’s sake, tell me.”

“You’re serious? You’ve never heard— tossing salad?” Orville had thought that Brad must have been kidding, after all, how in the world could he have gotten to this point in life and never heard this joke? “It’s a euphemism for eating ass.”

Brad’s expression of pure confusion lingers on just long enough that Orville knows then without a shadow of a doubt that he hadn’t been joking about not getting it, because _now_ it almost seems like Brad thinks that the concept of ass-eating is a joke too. Like that’s definitely not something people do, like he’s waiting for Orville to announce that he was kidding. Orville can’t quite tell just what that look on Brad’s face means, all wide eyes and blank expression, but fuck if it isn’t the funniest thing he thinks he’s ever seen.

“You’ve seriously never heard of eating ass?”

“No, of course I’ve heard of it, I just—”

“Really? Because it seems like you haven’t.”

“Of course I’ve heard of it!” Brad repeats, going absolutely crimson and avoiding eye contact as he holds the salad tongs, paralyzed and unable to toss the salad in the wake of the information he’s just been presented. “I just, I dunno, y’know, didn’t think it was a thing people really did.”

“Oh my god, you’re serious.” Orville sounds incredulous. Brad’s naivety is _sending him_.

“I just, I dunno, man!” Brad laughs at himself awkwardly, moving around, weaving where he’s standing, foot to foot, clearly uncomfortable.

Orville doesn’t think he’s ever found him more adorable than he does right now.

“So you’ve never tried it?” Orville asks with a tiny impish grin, this undertone of glee in his voice because of course Brad hasn’t tried it. That’s obvious. Orville’s just having a blast giving him a hard time now.

“You have?” Brad asks back in lieu of answering, and when he dares to look at Orville to gauge his response, he’s met with clear non-verbal confirmation that he definitely has. Then Orville opens his mouth and erases any shadow of a doubt he might still have.

“Oh, honey.” He doesn’t even need to honor that question with a legitimate answer. Then he adds, playfully judgmental, “You haven’t _lived_.”

Brad thinks he’s going to be absolutely haunted by that. By the sheer confidence in Orville’s words, the promise behind them. Something unfathomable, something he doesn’t even have context for. It’s something Brad’s never experienced, something so good that Orville’s singing its praises and looking at him like _that_ , blue eyes blazing. Brad’s cheeks are still stained red as he finally gathers the will to toss the salad up (though he can’t make eye contact with Orville while he does) because he can hear the fish sizzling up again and he’s got to get some more sauce on it or it’s not going to end up taking up enough flavor and staying moist while it finishes cooking.

Brad doesn’t know what to say or do, so he does what he does best in these situations — he talks aimlessly and starts picking on Orville to deflect the attention away from himself.

“You tryin’ to tell me cheese is gross but—” he waves his hand around as if the flailing, wristy gesture translates, and continues, “ _tossing salad_ —” because he can’t bring himself to say _eating_ _ass_ “—is somehow sooo mind-blowing.”

Brad’s just digging himself deeper here.

“Cheese is disgusting and unnatural.”

“Oh, _cheese_ is unnatural,” Brad can’t believe this strange, ass-eating, cheese-hating creature he’s invited into his home.

“Ass is amazing.”

“Ohmygawd, you’re unreal.”

“Listen, I’m not the only millennial in New York who hasn’t had their salad tossed,” Orville says with a grin.

“Hey, we’re in Jersey, respect the territory, bud. And who you callin’ a millennial?”

“Okay, I’ll give you that. You’re more like, what, a generation x-er in a millennial body.”

“Hey,” Brad says, sounding like he’s not sure if he should be offended by that or not. “You callin’ me old?”

“I meannn,” Orville grins, faux innocent as he watches Brad go over to spoon some sauce over the fish and adjust the temp of the burners under the flat top. “How many times did I have to walk you through that first FaceTime call?”

“Once!” Brad looks back at him, over his shoulder, contesting the call-out. “Just one time!”

“Oh, bullshit,” Orville laughs, eyes bright and fond, “You like ended the call twice or something and then just called me normally before you figured it out.”

“Okay, listen, that shit’s not so easy when you’re so friggin’ hard you can’t even see straight, okay? I’m not a, uh, y’know, techno genius like you are maybe.” He wiggles his fingers in Orville’s direction like the gesture somehow matches what he’d said — in his mind it does — and ducks his attention back away from Orville to turn some of the collars on the griddle. From where Orville’s sitting, he can see the way Brad’s cheeks are rounded up from a grin he can’t hide.

“Mmm, yeah, no wonder,” Orville could so easily take aim at that comment — couldn’t even see straight — but he lets it mostly slide in favor of just watching Brad at the stove. He’s half-recalling that night, when he’d finally gotten Brad to stop ending the FaceTime calls every time he tried to flip the camera view, how fucking good and how _not enough_ it had been to watch and hear Brad bring himself off and not be able to touch him through it. To see that big hand wrapped around that thick dick and not be able to taste or ride it. Now, he’s looking at Brad and thinking about how that knit Henley he’s wearing accentuates the broadness of his back and shoulders, and his attention is drifting down to his ass and thinking about just how very badly he wants to show him _his_ recipe for a good tossed salad and watch as his brain melts out through his ears.

Orville slides off the counter and with one step he’s just behind Brad, rests his chin on his shoulder and presses a kiss against the side of his flushed face, heat coming off his skin in waves that’s nothing to do with the temperature of the kitchen and everything to do with the conversation and the kissing and Orville’s inability to keep his hands off of him.

“That smells amazing...” Orville murmurs softly, looking down at the fish over his shoulder, chin tucked just there. One hand is resting on his bicep for balance while the other is moving down his back, thumb finding the curve at the base of his spine before sweeping his palm fully down over his ass through those faded soft gray jeans. He just _had_ to cop a feel after all this ass talk.

Brad effectively ceases to function, click-clacking the tongs pointlessly a few times while stammering little _weh buh duh_ type Brad-Sounds™ and pushing at the fish with his bare fingers like he forgot he’s holding tongs in the other hand.

“How long till it’s done?” Orville asks, turning his hand so it’s just bony knuckles dragging up and down the cleft of Brad’s ass through his jeans and he can feel him clench uncertainly in response. There’s a desire that’s starting to bloom in Orville, a want he doesn’t always end up consumed by, but there’s something about Brad that just makes him want to jump head-first into everything, experience _everything_ , get lost in him. It feels more real, less boxed in, like being with Brad is letting him tap into himself more fully, letting him explore sides of himself that other men found unpalatable.

“I’m, uh... it’s, now,” Brad stammers as he knuckles the fish along the flat top, unconsciously mimicking the way Orville’s touching his ass.

“Mmm, good... because I can’t wait to get a taste of that salad.”

Brad’s lucky he hasn’t taken a couple layers off his palm by accidentally laying it on the griddle in a desperate bid to ground himself. He does clench a hand into a fist and jab his knuckles into his hip like it’ll sober him from the crushing flirty repartee they’re tossing back and forth. Or, more accurately, that Orville’s just absolutely demolishing him with, while Brad continues to completely fall apart beneath it.

Orville moves around the peninsula to sit while Brad pulls the fish off the flat top onto one plate, and the intention was that it was just the serving plate. He’s got two more waiting by the cutting board, but when he sets the platter with the fish down on the cutting board to give the salad another little toss to move the dressing around — dying inside a little as he does so, unable to think of anything but the idea of Orville’s sinful mouth on his ass — Orville picks up a fork and starts to flake the fish off the bone, not bothering to wait till it’s plated.

“Hey, gimme a second and I’ll plate it up nice nice,” Brad says as he picks up a plate, but Orville’s already got a bite on his fork.

“Save the dishes.”

“Well hey, at least wait for the rest of the spoon sauce,” Brad insists as he sets the plate back down and goes for the little bowl of sauce, trying to beat Orville to it.

Orville doesn’t, just fixes Brad with a defiant stare and pops the first bite into his mouth.

“Well,” Brad chortles, “Gonna be like that, huh?” He spoons sauce over the rest of the fish, waiting to hear how Orville likes it, eyes flicking up to his face from the dish, eager for feedback.

“Oh my god,” Orville’s talking with his mouth full, his expression one of pure bliss. “That is _so_ fucking good.”

“Thanks, I made it myself,” Brad jokes with a proud grin as he sets the bowl aside and goes to the fridge. “Want another beer?”

“Yeah, I’ll have one of what you’re having.”

“Right on.”

“I’m serious,” Orville continues, a second bite in his mouth now with spoon sauce, “This is incredible. Are you a chef or something?”

“Nah, it’s just somethin’ I dabble around with, you know. Don’t like to be mixin’ up business with pleasure.”

“Oh, sure,” Orville humors him even though it’s a load of bull, even though they’d absolutely mixed business with pleasure that day in the test kitchen.

Brad knows what Orville means and hears it, realizes his slip up, but doesn’t correct himself, just lets it ride. The both of them joke circles around that first day because they’re eager for the second.

Brad rests the beers on the counter, pops them open and moves around the peninsula to sit near Orville, passing one to him.

“Thank you,” Orville says, gaze slipping down sidelong as Brad settles down on his stool, bare feet hooked around the rungs as he gets comfortable.

Orville goes to help himself to a second bite while Brad’s leaning in for his first. Normally, he’d have been tasting along the way — and to be fair, he had gotten a taste of the sauce after he’d mixed it up — but he’d have snuck a bite of fish while it was still on the grill just to be sure it was alright, if Orville hadn’t distracted him so much.

Getting a bite now, he can’t help but exclaim, “Guh, it’s so moist and nice.”

Orville just grins and goes for a sip of his beer because Brad’s got a second bite in his mouth in short order and it sounds as though he might need a little bit of privacy with it. Setting his beer back down slowly on the counter while Brad moans obscenely over the fish, Orville shoots one eyebrow up in question.

“You, uh... need me to step out for a couple?”

“Huh?” Brad asks, clueless and goes for a third, completely ignoring the salad in favor of the fish.

“You sound like you’re about to cum in your pants,” Orville smirks and bumps his nose with his knuckle, dipping to hide behind his hand for a second at that comment.

“Aw, c’mon,” Brad elbows in his direction, barely making contact with Orville, and laughing as he gets his next bite. As if on cue, he makes another way-too-sexual sound of pleasure as he does so — and he hears it and shakes his head, laughing, and tries to beat Orville to the punch with, “Lea’mme alone, man!”

Now Orville’s laughing too. Brad can’t take it. Smiling and laughing with mouthfuls of fish physically _hurts_ , but stopping eating long enough to recover isn’t an option.

“Don’t look at me,” Brad laughs and tries to hide behind his fork after another bite and another escaped moan (albeit a smaller one).

“Jesus Christ, you’re like _When Harry Met Sally_ over here,” Orville laughs and the next time Brad goes in for a bite Orville steals the one it looks like he’d been going for.

“Hey! Wow. Rude,” Brad complains, trying for a serious tone and falling short. “I make you this nice meal and you spend the whole time I’m cooking talkin’ dirty to me about how you’d rather eat ass than cheese and _now_ you won’t share,” Brad mentions ass-eating again because it’s on his mind, and he’s doing that thing of bringing it up too much because now that he’s aware it’s a _thing_ and he might want to try it, the only way he can think to keep broaching the subject is just to keep bringing it up unnecessarily.

“Listen, after a good shower, ass is great, but with cheese... c’mon, who knows where that shit’s been?”

A laugh explodes out of Brad at the sheer ridiculousness of it, but again, he can’t help thinking about what it is he’s been missing.

The same kind of stupid back and forth continues between them, good-naturedly taking the piss out of each other, their own brand of flirting, while they go at the fish and help themselves to salad right out of the bowl like heathens.

If Orville starts flaking the fish with the tines of his fork almost nervously, Brad doesn’t notice because his attention and focus are being dragged in so many different directions it’s a wonder he’s still got enough blood in his brain to fuel his body. It’s Orville’s turn to be nervous and uncomfortable, and it’s not something he does well. No one likes being vulnerable, but Orville just doesn’t go there typically, doesn’t let himself cross over from where he’s sure-footed to where he’s on uneven ground. He’s spent so many years keeping his own heart at arms length that when he starts to dance closer to something real, there’s a part of him that edges into something like panic. Like that part of him’s a scared, sheltered pony that frights at every narrowing of the path.

“Hey, y’know, so,” he starts talking, trying for casual and feeling sure he’s missing it by a mile, “I went to the doctor last month—”

“Oh no, everything okay, bud?” Brad interrupts him before he gets out the words he’s trying to figure out how to say, and the absolutely sincere, earnest concern Orville sees in Brad’s warm, bearded face has him nearly forgetting just how he’d planned to get it out.

“Yeah, yeah... I’m fine, no, that’s not what I meant, nothing was wrong, I just... I went and got tested. And I’m clean, all clear. Got my results the other day...”

“Oh, okay,” Brad says like he’s not sure why Orville’s telling him this. He’s wondering if he’d been concerned about it, or if this was a segue into a conversation about how he’s sleeping with other people and wanted to let Brad know he was being careful about it — or that he’s not, but he’s clean regardless. Brad’s not sure why but the uncertainty behind why Orville’s sharing all this is sitting like a hard knot in his chest and he stabs into the salad for a bite which he eats with both elegance and grace, a piece of arugula sticking out of his mouth like a rabbit till he can get it all contained. Real slick.

“I’m just saying because, y’know, maybe we don’t need a condom. If you’re clean too, I mean.”

Brad just blinks at him in the wake of that and if he were any other man his mind would probably be going a mile a minute at that, but Brad’s just stuck on _maybe we don’t need a condom._ What does that mean?

“Do you know if you are, or...?” Orville prompts when he doesn’t say anything, when his expression doesn’t change from totally blank.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I mean it was six months ago or somethin’ but,” Brad’s staring at him, eyes big and round like a deer in headlights. “Y’know, nothing’s changed.”

Orville grins at that, _nothing’s changed_ , and lets his gaze drop down to Brad’s mouth, lingering there just long enough to be noticed before flicking back up. Flirting is way more within his comfort zone, the easy, sexy joking of it, but this deserves more seriousness because he can tell Brad’s got questions and this isn’t something to just brush past. So he makes himself face his discomfort head-on, for Brad.

“I haven’t slept with anyone else since September,” Orville says seriously. Then, with an uncomfortable shrug as he stabs at the fish again, “Since way before September, honestly... more like March or April. I’m not like... like, no pressure. At all, about anything. The condom... if you’re more comfortable using one, that’s fine with me, I just wanted you to know it’d be okay with me not to.”

Brad’s been sitting there, half-perched on his bar stool, in rapt attention as Orville dropped the flirty joking and got real with him about this and it’s like it barely computes. He hasn’t slept with anyone else. Someone as pretty as Orville hasn’t slept with anyone since _April_. Since September, he hasn’t been with anyone but Brad. Are they exclusive? He’d also said no pressure, about anything, but at the same time he wanted not to use a condom and that feels pretty exclusive. Suddenly the withering, uncertain look that’s settling in on Orville’s face is telling him he needs to respond.

“I’m, uh, I mean, y’know... yeah. Y’know, sure. Not—not _sure_ , but like, _yeah_. Hell yeah,” Brad’s floundering around to figure out how to reply and not sound twelfth-grade-girl giddy at the prospect of something like exclusivity, but at the same time not sounding so casual about it as to fumble the moment entirely. There’s a line somewhere in between to walk, and Brad’s missing it entirely, a complete and utter goddamn mess if there ever was one.

“Yeah?” Orville asks, fork still in hand but dinner long since forgotten. He’s still hungry, but it isn’t fish he’s angling for.

“Yeah,” Brad says seriously, forgetting the food for a moment in favor of taking in the look on Orville’s face, so open and uncertain. It’s still a trip for him to be one of the few who get to see behind the mask, to have a face to connect to the name, and seeing the flirty jokey side of him fall feels like another mask being stripped away.

Brad doesn’t know what hit him when Orville stands, collides with him in a kiss — he’s left reeling, catching himself, disentangling his feet from the rungs of the stool for balance. Orville’s got him pushed up against the live edge of the counter and pulls back from the kiss, Brad chasing his mouth hungrily only for Orville to lean back just that much more, playing keep-away. Brad exhales his frustration but doesn’t have long to try and fight it.

“I want you to fuck me,” Orville’s so close to Brad while he’s speaking that their mouths brush with every word. “Right here on the kitchen floor, right now. You understand me?”

“Oh-ho, yeah,” Brad huffs a breathless laugh, eyes glazed and unseeing from being so close, too close. He weaves back enough that he’s able to fix his gaze on Orville’s full lips and he comes back in to try and steal his way back into the kiss. Orville indulges him, but only just, and then he’s keeping just enough distance to carry on talking.

“I wanna feel every inch of that dick inside me with nothing between us,” Orville practically growls, presses their noses together like he’s challenging him, like he’s daring him to back down or step up. Brad’s slow to react, but he _is_ reacting, startled by the aggression and so caught up in what he’s saying that he’s having a hard time keeping focus on everything else.

“Fucking Christ...”

“I want to feel you cum in my ass,” Orville whispers against Brad’s mouth, hears the air escape the taller man like steam from a kettle seconds before he presses a searing kiss to his lips, and that seems like it’s done it. That’s the thing that set him off, flipped some switch inside him like taking the safety off a gun, like there’s some part of him that’s long lay dormant that’s now waking up. Brad’s big hands move down Orville’s chest to his waist, gripping him hard enough that he might leave bruises as he gets up to his feet.

It seems like Brad’s forgotten where they’re headed already because he’s turning them so Orville’s pressed up against the counter, and that wasn’t in the plan at all. It’s not disagreeable, but they haven’t cleared dinner off, and Orville doesn’t have the patience to do so before they get round one in.

“Take your fucking pants off,” Orville gasps as he pulls back again, hands catching Brad’s by the wrists and pushing him off. It takes Brad a couple seconds for the message to hit his brain and be relayed to his body, but when it does — when he complies — Orville takes the opportunity to slip the short distance away to the table up against the far kitchen wall where his bag is sitting.

“Where’re ya...?” Brad trails off, turning to watch Orville go, half way through working to open his fly, unable to imagine why Orville’s walking away from him _now_.

“ _Pants_ ,” Orville reminds him, whipping his own t-shirt off and throwing it back at Brad, following the move with a chastising wag of his finger, before unzipping his duffle and, after a few seconds of searching, pulls out a tube of lube. By the time he’s back, Brad’s got his jeans undone and he’s pushing them down his hips. His shirt’s still on, obedient to the letter about taking his pants off, so much so that he’d skipped his shirt. Orville doesn’t bother futzing around with where to put the lube, up or down, because they’re going down so once he’s back he lets it drop to the floor.

Orville starts to undo his own pants, belt first and then fly, the clinking of the metal loud in the quiet of the room, the only sound contending with their heaving breaths. The second his fly’s undone he gives his jeans a shove down and kicks out of them, moving in to help Brad out of his clothes. He steals a fast kiss and buries his fists in the soft waffle knit of his navy Henley and yanks it up, bunching under his arms, and pulls from the kiss to bark another order, “Arms up.”

Brad isn’t fighting him so much as he just wants his hands on Orville, doesn’t want to have to stop even long enough to get his shirt off, but when Orville tugs at his shirt again he gives in, lifts his arms and lets Orville peel his shirt off him in one smooth move. It knocks his hat off along with it, but Brad’s in no mindset to complain about something like that now, not giving a single fuck about how wild his hair looks. He’s too distracted by Orville’s nakedness in his kitchen, the heaviness of that hard cock between his tattooed thighs. Brad’s all but forgotten about his own jeans, still bunched around his knees. Instead, he’s edging into Orville’s space, forehead to forehead as he looks down between their bodies. There’s something animalistic about Brad now, something almost primal. Orville doesn’t know what it is or where it came from, maybe from the comfort of this not being a first time, or from having the home team advantage. Or maybe it’s how direct Orville’s being, the fact that he’d gone to get tested and how he’d laid out exactly what he wanted, the fact that they are on the same page in so many ways now after months of texts and calls and video chats.

“Get on the floor,” Orville’s voice is soft between them, but Brad isn’t jumping to obey.

“You’re bossy...” Brad croons softly and leans in to catch his mouth, a hand coming up to cup his jaw, thumb dragging over his cheek. Fingers rake through his short hair and he catches him there, by the nape of the neck and he hadn’t expected Orville’s reaction to that, the way he yields under the sureness of his touch, lips parting to let Brad take whatever it was he was after, trying to devour him whole.

Orville loves the shift, the edge he sees glinting in Brad. He’d seen it that first day in the test kitchen, in the moment when Brad made his decision, communicated it with the tight grip of his heavy hand on his shoulder urging Orville to his knees, and he’d hoped that with enough of a push, with enough friction and wearing on the dull edge of him that he’d grind him down sharp into something secret and hard and maybe even dangerous in the wrong hands. That doesn’t mean Orville’s about to stop acting the whetstone, stop trying to wear his patience to a thin line.

“Get on the floor,” Orville repeats himself, tone changed. He’s more insistent even as Brad keeps leaning into his space, closer than dancing as they sway subtly together in the space between the peninsula and the pantry, like fighters in the ring, waiting for _go._

“You get on the floor,” Brad pushes back with a silly grin, _bold._

Fuck if that’s not the hottest thing Orville’s heard out of him so far, so he rewards it. Sinks to his knees right then and there, hands catching Brad’s jeans and tugging them down the rest of the way and helping him off with them. Looking up at him from the floor, he watches Brad watching him, messy, hat-squashed curls framing his head like a wild halo.

The dynamic shifts again. Brad’s boldness bleeds out when he’s not toe to toe with Orville, when he’s not breathing in the challenge of the singer’s words. With Orville at his feet, Brad needs a hand-hold on the countertop, some point of connection in space, like he can’t quite trust his body to keep him upright without something else outside it to ground him to the earth. The bob and weave of this is dizzying, Brad’s shift from welcome aggressor to passive recipient instantaneous; Orville doesn’t leave him waiting long.

Hands sweep back up Brad’s legs and thighs, one coming to catch and steady him, fingers gripping the base of his cock and bringing it to his mouth. It’s just then — with the leaking head of Brad’s cock a centimeter from his lips — that Orville remembers something, and looks down at Brad’s discarded jeans, complete with heather gray boxer briefs bunched up in them.

“...what was that again, about going commando? Six years, you said... that’s interesting...”

Brad doesn’t have the kind of brainpower he’d need to respond with words, instead he lets out a groan of complaint that Orville’s still harping on the fucking commando remark and lays his hand down on the top of his head, pulling him in just close enough that his cock bumps up against Orville’s full lips. It’s subtle but it’s another shift back to bold, to making it unmistakably clear what he wants.

Orville exhales warm over Brad’s cock and turns his head slowly this way and that, letting the wet-slick head slip across the seam of his mouth, tongue slowly teasing its way out to get a taste. Brad groans above him and Orville hums in reply like he’s got a delicacy on his hands, mumbling something about how much of a mess Brad is, ‘ _already drooling for him’_. He leans in, takes the head into his mouth, and with the loud, wet sound of gathering saliva in his mouth he leans in more, far enough all in one go that his nose grazes the soft nest of curls at the base. Somewhere above him there’s a clattering sound of something on the counter being knocked over and a sudden, startled, “ _Fuck!_ ”

“God, you taste good,” Orville breathes as he comes up for air, his hand chasing up to the head to make up for the loss of his mouth.

“Oh, fuck,” Brad repeats. He can barely look at him as he sinks back down, those obscene, full lips wrapped tight around his cock as he goes, but he can’t look away either. He’s not sure they’re going to make it to what Orville’s already said he wants, not if he carries on like this. When Orville comes off his dick again with a soft _pop_ , he licks his lips, sticky and wet with precum and saliva.

“You want some?” Orville asks, and the truth is Brad doesn’t know what he’s asking, not really.

But the answer is yes, emphatically _yes._ Brad wants everything Orville’s willing to give him, wants every inch of him over and over again, so he nods yes. Orville gives him another slow, thorough stroke and another and drags his tongue over the head of his cock, sweeping away the fresh beads of precum that he’d teased out, and murmurs, “Get down here.”

Brad’s quick to move this time, and the second he’s on his knees Orville surges forwards to kiss him, giving him a taste of himself, teasing his tongue into Brad’s mouth. Brad catches on slow and it’s nothing he’s done before, nothing he even has words to describe, but in that moment he’s entirely consumed by how unspeakably hot it is that he can taste himself in Orville’s mouth. That the deeper they kiss it seems like they’re sharing more than breath and the passing sweep of tongue; they’re sharing spit.

When they finally part they don’t quite, still connected by a single line of saliva that catches in the dying light streaming in the small kitchen’s single window, made gossamer as it stretches between them. When it doesn’t break Orville lets himself be drawn back in by it, kissing his way back into Brad’s mouth as he wraps his arms around him, around his shoulders, hand cradling back of his head, fingers tangled in him.

Somehow together they negotiate their way to the floor, Orville atop him, straddling his body and pulling back slowly, sitting back on his hips and feeling the hard press of Brad’s cock between his legs. Brad’s hands skim up Orville’s thighs, big enough to trace the inside with his thumbs and smooth over the tops with palms and fingers, feeling the slight difference in his skin where he’s tattooed. Orville takes one of those hands in his and pulls it to his mouth, curls the ring finger and pinky down and sucks the first two fingers into his mouth, tongue working over them slowly, getting them good and wet.

They’re holding eye contact, Orville’s heavy-lidded bedroom intensity caught on Brad’s startled interest. The more time he spends with Orville, fucking him, talking to him about fucking him, and jerking off with him on FaceTime, the more he’s learning about himself. He should know what’s coming but he doesn’t, brain moving sluggish like he’s walking through molasses, just stuck in the moment and the experience, the feeling of Orville fellating his fingers now instead of his cock. He thinks that’s all this is, just some teasing reminder of the last step before they move on.

Orville takes his time and he’s thorough, thorough enough that he feels Brad’s cock twitch beneath him in neglected interest, knows he’s thinking about how good that mouth feels on his fingers, and missing it where it counts. Brad’s not at all prepared for it when Orville tugs Brad’s hand from his lips and moves, raises himself up on his knees, licking his lips as he guides Brad’s hand between his legs, encouraging him to rub.

Brad’s staring up at Orville and rubbing his saliva slick fingers in tight circles against his entrance while Orville holds him by the wrist like his hand is something to be used, like it’s a dildo that’s his to aim and guide and fuck himself with. Though he’d eased him open last time too, this is different — being used like a thing, like a prop, that does something to him. It’s a night of firsts and Brad’s head is swimming in sensation, every new discovery hitting him like a punch, leaving him reeling.

“Oh my god, babe,” Brad’s voice is soft, awed as Orville sinks himself down on two fingers at once, gives Brad no say in the matter, using him to prepare himself. He goes slow and Brad can feel how tight he is, how much effort he’s putting into relaxing enough to receive.

Orville doesn’t stop until he takes him to the knuckles with a low groan, lets his head tip back and breaks from the eye contact, needing just a second to settle himself in his skin without Brad staring up at him, eyes wide and soulful and too easy to get lost in. He wants to steel himself, but the second he almost feels like he’s steady, Brad curls his fingers inside him without warning. Orville can feel the flexing muscles and tendons in Brad’s wrist beneath his fingers, but it’s not a warning, just an accompaniment. It’s sheer dumb luck, it’s gotta be, because it’s such a far cry from last time — Orville practically talked him through prepping him — to now managing to curl his fingers just _so_ and nudge inside him so perfectly just right it steals a shaky breath from him, has him practically forgetting what he’s doing, his knee-jerk response being to rock down, to chase after more, to grip Brad’s wrist more tightly.

Brad just stares because it _is_ sheer dumb luck. He knew what he wanted to have done but didn’t know how to know if he was doing it right — what to feel for or distances or techniques or any of that, at least not with men — and yet here he’d happened upon unexpectedly striking home the first time he tried.

All Orville can think about is how this isn’t enough anymore, but it hadn’t been enough from the start. Orville’s been thinking about, wanting this for longer than he might readily admit. Long enough to decide to go and get tested, because last time hadn’t been enough either. He’d wanted more, wanted Brad so impossibly close it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. It’s what he’d held onto in those months between the hotel and today, what he imagined when they texted, when they switched to phone and video calls in the middle of the night the few times they had.

It’s not enough, but the idea of losing this entirely, even briefly as they move towards what’s next feels intolerable. So he holds on a little longer, trying to wring every ounce of pleasure from riding Brad’s fingers. He’s holding Brad’s wrist too tightly and it can’t be a comfortable angle, but the sensible part of Brad’s brain that might have been capable of letting him know wasn’t operational just now.

“Fuck me…” he breathes as he lets Brad’s wrist go, shamelessly unable to stop himself from touching where they’re connected, where Brad’s thick fingers disappear inside his body. Their eyes catch then, the expression on Orville’s slack face one of eager invitation, pure lust. He’s drunk on wanting but there’s more to it than that, more he hasn’t really let himself face yet.

Brad misinterprets the invitation, drawing on the brush of Orville’s slim fingers over his knuckles and the fact he hasn’t made to move away, and manages to rock his hand up, curled fingers and thumb nudging his balls as he starts to fingerfuck him clumsily. It’s the last thing Orville expected — he’d been just about to move, go for the lube or tell Brad to, and shift positions — but now all he wants is _this_. It blindsides him, and for a moment they’re locked together just like this, Brad’s arm screaming from the strain of the angle as he carries on doing whatever he’s doing that has Orville looking down at him like that.

It takes every ounce of willpower but one of them has to break or they’re never going to stop, to get to what it is they both really want, and Orville knows it won’t be Brad.

“Get the lube.”

Brad doesn’t need to be told twice. He pulls his hand away, feels how Orville curls instinctively closer at the loss, and finds it. His hands are moving faster than his brain can direct them to pop the cap and spread some over his cock, and Orville barely waits until he has before he moves down on him. It’s not the first time in Orville’s life he’s been fucked bare, but somehow nothing in his life had quite prepared him for that first moment he took Brad inside him raw.

“Oh God,” Orville breathes out as Brad sinks in, fingertips still resting on Brad’s soft belly for balance.

“Fuck,” Brad’s head connects with the hardwood floor.

That’s a sentiment Orville feels bone-deep. _Fuck_. This is just what Orville needed, the feel of Brad inside him and nothing else. The awareness that when Brad comes he’s going to cum inside him, that he’s going to feel the heat and slip of it as they move. As if he’d already forgotten, he moves up again just so he can sink back down, so he can feel all that delicious friction as he takes him in again inch by inch.

They occupy a strange space, strike an odd rhythm, the two of them. They’re proof positive that looks can be deceiving, that you can’t just bank on the bigger, taller, burlier one being the top while the slender one is the bottom. Nothing as nuanced as this can be distilled down to simple structure. And for Orville, it all changes when he’s with someone new, when he _is_ someone new, reinventing himself the second he wakes up and feels the wind come in from a different direction. Sure, so far he’s received with Brad, but to conflate that with bottoming would be a mistake. It’s more complicated than that. It’s a conversation, a rhythm, a give and take and there’s room for both at once. Space to demand and devour in the same breath, be desperate and vulnerable in turns.

This isn’t what it looks on the face of it. Orville isn’t letting himself be fucked or taken by Brad, Orville’s swallowing him whole. It’s action, not acceptance. He becomes unfathomable, monstrous, a thing that emerges from the dark ocean and opens its jaws wide and drinks everything down; he becomes merciless. And so he rides, thighs flexing, working to get Brad’s dick just where he wants it.

Orville grabs Brad by the wrists and settles those big hands on his thighs, gives them a place to be and feels them caress up of their own accord, cradle his hips in the spread between fingers and thumb. Brad’s not guiding Orville to move, he’s just feeling the rocking of his body, almost like he’s the one riding and Orville is something wild he can’t hope to tame. Under his palms Orville’s muscles flex beneath the skin and he squeezes just to feel it: a nonverbal _hello_ from hands to hips.

But it’s still not enough. Orville wants his mouth on him too, wants their bodies crushed together — wants Brad’s weight heavy over him. He doesn’t wait long to chase that, unable to resist leaning down and catching Brad’s parted lips in a kiss, relishing the soft brush of his full beard against his skin. Relishing, too, in the eagerness of Brad’s mouth as he surges up to meet and keep him, the grip of his hands growing insistent then, like if he holds him tighter at the hip he can keep him closer in this embrace.

Orville wonders if they can turn over like this without parting, not sure he can handle another loss, no matter how brief. He’d tolerated the loss of his fingers but he doesn’t think he can lose this now too, not so soon after finally getting it.

Need overwhelms him before long and he pulls from Brad’s mouth just enough to demand, “Get on top of me.”

They do have to part to get there, but at the end of the awkward shuffle of limbs, Orville’s flat on his back and pulling his legs up, offering himself to Brad like the taller man might really be in control. Like Orville had been told to, like there’d been instructions given, desires voiced, about wanting his knees to his chest, wanting to see that ass, wanting to fuck him in half. It’s clear that hadn’t been the case when Brad stutters not vocally but in action, stopping short just to stare at him like he wasn’t quite sure what he’d done to deserve this. Like having a half-folded Orville Peck offered up to him like this was very possibly going to kill him before the night was through.

“If you don’t get back inside me right now, I swear to God,” Orville doesn’t even quite know what to threaten him with; he can’t think. He’s gripping his thighs behind the knee and thankfully then he doesn’t have long to wait because the threat acts like spurs to Brad’s sides and jumps him into action.

Brad’s on him again then, over him, pressing inside him. He’s everywhere all of a sudden, and like this with Orville’s legs up and together rather than spread wide, Brad feels thicker than he is, feels impossible, and Orville groans and lets his head fall back on the floor and just takes.

“Slower,” Orville has to ask, demand, needs longer strokes than the fast, eager ones Brad’s winding up into, needs to feel every fucking inch as he moves inside him but he can’t get all that out — all he can manage is that one word, _slower_ — and when he slows, somewhere over Brad’s head, Orville’s toes curl to feel it.

“Fuck,” Orville hits the ‘k’ hard and, the word out, sobs a breath back in to refill his lungs. “Just like that… oh, _fu-uck_.” A deep thrust punches that last word into a second syllable and Brad needs to hear it again, that usually clear, deep voice starting to rise, starting to break.

They’re closer than they’ve ever been before and it feels incredible. Brad could get lost in this, in the heat of Orville’s body, the sweat and scent of his skin. Insensible, he’s nosing into Orville’s neck, against the hollow of his throat and the cut of his collarbone, finding secret places to fit his mouth against. When he hears low and rhythmic groans, Brad’s far enough gone already that he doesn’t realize it’s him and not the man beneath him starting to come apart at the seams.

Slow is hard to keep up with when Brad’s mind keeps slipping away, keeps drifting to the way Orville’s hands feel as they search him out and urge him on, the way his breath keeps hitching on every stroke. He forgets and he goes faster until he can feel Orville tense beneath him, body gone taut like the string of a bow at full draw, so turned on that any amount of _too much too soon_ threatens to tear him apart.

So Orville reminds him, “Slow.”

Because he doesn’t want to cum, not yet. He wants this to last.

“Sorry,” Brad breathes into his skin, no space between them.

“S’okay,” Orville manages somehow. He doesn’t want Brad to apologize, doesn’t want him to feel like this is anything less than exactly what he needs, but there’s not a chance he can string together enough coherent thought to communicate anything like that right now. Instead he tries to find him again, nuzzles closer, nosing his neck and bearded jaw until Brad gets the hint.

Brad kisses him like an anchor point for that drawn tight string, like a constant, like the steadying breath before letting go. In that moment they fall into tenuous sync, one that feels impossible to hold, like it’s come with a weight behind it and it’s just a matter of time before one of them loses step.

But it doesn’t happen, not yet. They aren’t lost except in each other, and they don’t fall apart except to breathe, and when they do they’re still forehead to forehead. They’re breathing each other’s air, trading it like secrets in the winter stillness.

This time when Brad forgets and loses _slow_ , Orville keeps up with him, welcoming _more_ and _faster_ with a heavy groan, ankles crossed behind Brad’s head, somehow miraculously drawing a thinner line between them. Brad’s making these sounds like he’s trying to say something, trying to question what on earth Orville is doing that _feels like that_ , but he doesn’t have a chance to find his words because before he does, Orville’s found some of his own:

“Spit in my mouth...”

He’s not demanding and he’s not asking; he’s begging. He’s not sure Brad will give him what he wants, but he asks just the same because by now he’s so far gone he can’t think twice. He’s so far beyond pumping the brakes it’s not funny. But Brad’s far beyond denying him, too.

Truth be told, there wasn’t much of anything Brad would deny him if he just asked, especially like this, full lips kiss-bruised and shining in the kitchen light.

It’s maybe lucky he’s as far gone as he is because it means he’s not overthinking this, not caught up and fumbling over the fact that he’s never done anything like it before Orville pushed him to taste himself. He just closes his mouth and works his jaw to pool saliva on his tongue and lets the stream he’d gathered fall, and he watches as Orville’s mouth opens for it. Brad can see the eagerness in the cast of his features, the draw of his brows and the quickening of his breath in the second before the line of spit connects them, not for the first time tonight.

The first time had been almost subtle, the swapping of spit snuck in under the guise of sharing a taste, but this time is different for Orville. This time shuts off his brain and leaves him animal, leaves his body stripped to a live-wire, the sheer filthy pleasure of it voiced in a sound that Brad’s going to carry to his grave; so deep and full-throated and primal it can’t possibly be legal. Brad watches as his head falls back, as that strand of spit that connects them thins and breaks, leaves Orville’s mouth wet and obscene.

“ _Hoo_ , gah—fuh,” Brad can’t. He just… can’t. Can’t watch this and feel this and fuck him and hold it all together. It’s too much, too tall an order. He’s going to die here on his kitchen floor, days before Christmas, at the hands (among other parts) of Orville Peck, and maybe that’s alright. Maybe it doesn’t matter if this is how he gets to go.

But Orville doesn’t give him the space to shut down.

“Don’t you dare,” Orville says it like he knows, like he can translate the meaning of Brad’s half-words, can feel his brain start to shut down. He doesn’t elaborate because he can’t, but he wills Brad to understand by reaching for him, catching the back of his neck and drawing him closer, guiding him just with the insistent press of his fingertips. When he can, Orville catches his mouth and gives it back, gives everything back — all the passion that’s inside him, all of this desperate need to touch and feel and be fucked so good he’s got nothing left, laid bare here on Brad’s kitchen floor and gasping for breath. And their mingled spit, he gives that back too, lost in the rhythm of give and take.

There’s a sound caught between them and it’s hard to know where it starts and who echoes it back, but it doesn’t matter because right now they’re crossing the line. Now they’re more than just the sum of their parts.

“Please,” Orville begs, bitten-red lips parted and eyes unfocused but searching.

There’s something about the softness of Orville’s expression, open and trusting and needy that sparks something possessive in Brad, and he answers with a snap of his hips, a hard thrust that earns a breathless, “ _—yeah_ ,” from the man beneath him.

“Yeah?” Brad echoes back, their faces so close they barely need sound to communicate across the distance.

“Mhmm…” Orville’s nod moves them both and he grips the back of Brad’s neck tight, thumb dragging along his jaw and earlobe, but the next thrust comes hard enough to rock him, move him along the floor, and it takes him by surprise. Startles an _oh!_ out of him, has him grappling for handholds and finding Brad’s shoulders and arms instead.

“Y’like that?” Brad manages somehow, god knows how. Orville nods _yes_ and stares up at him with an expression so open, so earnest that if they weren’t locked together like this it’d hit him like a sucker punch.

But they are locked together, the both of them a tangle of limbs and sweat, and Brad gives it to him again and again and again until they’ve left the slow grind in the last slivers of the dying light and they’re fucking on the kitchen floor, fast and loud and brutal.

“ _Oh_ fuck,” Orville’s voice is changed by the force of this, the sudden urgency he can feel waking up in Brad though the staccato slap of their skin, and this is exactly what he’d needed. He’d known this was in there, knew there was something wild in Brad waiting to be woken up. All those nights for months when he stole some time to swap dirty texts with Brad, this is what he’d craved, to be fucked within an inch of his life across the kitchen floor, too desperate to make it even the twenty steps to the living room sofa.

Somehow in all of this, they’ve moved — Orville’s legs come down from Brad’s shoulders to free him up to move, free Orville up to spread for him — and try as he might to coil long legs around Brad’s waist, he can’t manage to hold on. He can’t stay still, twisting beneath Brad like he’s on fire and an arm is thrown over his head, a fist in his own hair for something to hold onto and he’s startled to feel his elbow connect with something hard. He gropes for it blindly and is passingly aware that it’s the leg of the industrial metal shelving to the right of Brad’s stove, that they’ve moved far enough across the floor that if he’s not careful he’s going to end up with his head bumping into it. So he keeps hold and above them they can hear the sway and clatter of the pans hanging above them.

That sound sobers Brad long enough to cast a glance up and decide they’re not in any danger, because if his kitchen could handle his chaotic energy cooking it could handle this. Still, the fact they’d inched along this far stokes something in him, feels dirtier somehow than the fact that they’d started on the floor.

“Yer a bad boy,” Brad croons like he’s blaming him for this, and comes close enough that he could catch his mouth but he’s so focused on fucking him, on how they fit together that he doesn’t bridge the distance. He can’t do that many things at once, can’t coordinate his body and mouth at the same time. Instead he fucks Orville slow and deep and watches the expressions pass over his face at everything: at the loss of _fast_ in favor of _deep_ and the accusation of _bad boy_.

It’s true, so true, and it hits Orville like a slap across the mouth, one he’d asked for in the heaving dark, and he owns it — a nod and a _yeah_ murmured just for Brad — and he doesn’t get the chance to surge forward because Brad beats him to it.

Brad is helpless against the soft invitation of his mouth, so he accepts, lets himself in. Below the crush of it their bodies slow because nothing’s changed, he can’t juggle fucking and kissing, one is always going to suffer for the other. It’s intolerable for Orville and he tries to make up for it, tries to wrap himself around the larger man, tries to let him further inside his skin than he already is. Brad gets swept up, manages somehow to move and devour him at the same time but he’s moving on something like instinct, his brain already so far offline.

This time Orville doesn’t ask for it — they’re beyond words now, communicating with something higher — but as their lips part Brad nudges nose to nose and something in Orville’s wordless, breathless reply brings him back mouth to mouth. Brad does it again, sharing saliva without being asked, and it has him teetering on the edge. It’s so much less distinct than the first time, the edges blurred out and lost in the wet sweep of tongues that it almost bears the question of who’s giving and who’s taking.

Orville wants to warn him, wants to demand more, wants to lay everything he wants out bare, tell Brad every filthy thought that’s racing through his head but even as they break for air he can’t manage more than a whimper. They fall back into step again and above them the rattle of pans is a tipoff that it’s rough and clumsy, the rhythm between them hard to hold as everything starts to fall apart.

“I’m gonna—” Brad manages somehow by way of warning and he tries to slow, to stop it somehow because he wants Orville to come first. But Orville has other ideas.

“ _Yeah,_ ” Orville answers in a voice that’s high and foreign, urgent and desperate with need. He doesn’t let Brad try to slow, to hold back, instead coiling his legs around him, digging his heels into his back. “Give it to me, give it to me...” he whispers, repeats like praise or an incantation.

When Brad comes Orville can _feel it_ , hot and sudden and so slick that the next stuttered thrust sinks easier. Orville can feel the pulse of it in his core and the sheer reality of their connection overwhelms him. Brad’s coming apart at the seams above him in a mess of sound.

“Oh, fuck.” It could have been either or both of them saying that then, but it’s Orville as his head drops back against the wooden floor. He gropes a hand down blindly between them, grabbing for himself, stroking not because he isn’t close but because he is. Brad feels that, the drag of knuckles against his belly, the head of Orville’s slick cock nudging him too, and he tries to rally. The next thrust is deliberate and jarring and it punches the air out of Orville with a soft, reflexive swear. They slow like a machine breaking down, like gears grinding on the way to a halt.

It’s obvious when Orville starts to come even before it hits because he writhes beneath Brad like he’s trying to escape it, like it’s too much to take. His face is all screwed up and he’s shaking, legs trembling and he sobs out a breath. It’s inevitable, he’s coming whether he can take it or not but there’s a split second where he almost tries to hold it back, to still his hand or will it away but he can’t. Because somehow in the middle of everything, Brad caught on enough to push. Or maybe it was sheer dumb luck.

“C’mon,” Brad urges him so softly he could almost cry.

It’s over then, hits like a wave crashing and he can’t escape the force of it, coming messily between them, over his hand and Brad’s belly. The feeling is too much and there’s nowhere for it to go, like it’s bigger than his body and he’s overflowing, the tide in him barely contained. He’s moving like that’ll help, give it somewhere to go, help it dissipate into something tolerable, something that will fit inside his skin. He turns his face into the crook of his elbow because he’s afraid the sob in his throat is bringing tears in its wake and somehow under all of this there still lives enough self-consciousness to want to tuck that down, keep it hidden. He’d be drowning if not for Brad, the solid weight of him a constant, a port in the storm.

Starting to settle back into his bones, Orville’s aware of Brad’s face buried in his neck, at once giving him the space to hide and not letting him fully escape. The both of them are breathing hard still, Brad with his nose against Orville’s ear until he turns back to him and then they’re cheek to cheek. There’s a terrifying moment where Orville almost opens his mouth and says something he’ll regret, so caught up in how good this was that he almost mouths _I love you_ against Brad’s sweaty skin. But he catches himself, bites his lip to ensure it doesn’t slip out, doesn’t trust his body not to be a traitor.

“Holy shit,” Brad speaks first and breaks the spell.

Orville laughs at that, at something in the sound of his voice striking him funny, and it’s contagious. Brad’s laughing with him, his warm, goofy laugh loosening something in his chest that had tightened without his realizing it had.

“Fuck, you’re not kidding,” Orville blinks up at Brad and realizes he’d come so hard his vision is blurred. He doesn’t move to kiss him again right then, and he realizes a little late that last time he _had_ damn near immediately, riding the post-coital high of it. The difference this time draws attention to itself, or maybe it’s something more subtle than that.

“You alright?”

There’s something in the way Brad asks that makes Orville wonder how much he could read on his face, how much he’d given away while unguarded.

“More than,” Orville answers, because he is. There’s more, there’s something he hasn’t looked at fully and he has to at some point, but that’s not for tonight. Tonight he’s fine, he’s been fucked so good it could tide him over a while if it had to, but they’ve got another few nights left before Orville’s got to go and the thought of that pulls a little smile to his face. It means the chance to slow it all down, to take their time and get to know each other better, not just in the bedroom and the kitchen, and Orville’s more excited at that prospect than he maybe ought to be.

“Not sure I can say the same for your shelf,” Orville adds, glancing up at it. Now he’s close enough his hair grazes the leg and they’d managed to push it an inch or so along the floor.

Brad follows where he looks and laughs again, color rising in his cheeks like the awareness that they’d moved industrial shelving while fucking on the floor was the thing that’s got him bashful, rather than any of the rest of it.

“We’re lucky it didn’t come crashing down on our heads,” Brad says, and when Orville looks startled at his comment, he adds, “Don’t worry, I’m just messin’... my system’s flawless. I got S-hooks and everything, it’s not gonna fall just cause’a being pushed. I’ve bumped into it plenty and it’s still standing.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Orville says with a smile and takes his kiss belatedly from the corner of Brad’s kiss-bruised mouth and then again with fingers scrubbing through his bearded jaw to guide him in, urging him to linger. It’s only now that Orville’s got the sense to realize that Brad had been right: that the garlic had barely been an issue since they’d both had plenty.

Brad would be happy to stay just like this but he knows they can’t. The consolation is, he knows they have later and tomorrow and Sunday, that he gets to cook breakfast for Orville in the morning and fix lunch in the afternoon and they can just spend time together. The idea of it just feels wild — spending time with Orville Peck, relaxing, being casual. He’s not totally sure the weirdness of it doesn’t at least partly come from the celebrity factor, from being a fan of Orville’s. He has to chalk his excitement up to being at least a little bit starstruck, but he’d be lying if he said he doesn’t already know it’s more than that.

Reluctantly they move apart, Brad with a mind to get up but by the time he’s rolled to his side he thinks better of it, decides to lay flat on the cool floor for a couple minutes first, stretch his back out. He settles down beside Orville and looks over at him, watches as he rearranges himself. There’s not much room between the legs of the peninsula and the fridge, but Orville isn’t in any more of a rush to get up than Brad is.

Silence stretches on for a few moments as they lay there in the wake of what they’d just done, sweat cooling rapidly on their skin. Orville’s getting cold and moves to cuddle in for warmth, and he fits himself against Brad’s body, under his arm as he lifts it to make a space for him and a place to rest his head. Wrapping that arm around Orville’s shoulder, Brad lets on that his thoughts have been drifting elsewhere.

“I dunno about’choo, but I could go for some more’a that fish,” Brad muses aloud and cranes to look down at Orville who’s resting his cheek against Brad’s shoulder, and he feels and hears the fond laugh his words trigger.

“Why am I not surprised,” Orville tries his best to sound exasperated to discover that Brad’s mind was on his stomach again, but it’s hard to hold onto when he’s looking at him like that, a little boyish and earnest, and like he’s asking permission to get a snack.

“Hey,” Brad sounds indignant, like he feels he’s got to explain himself, “We hadn’t really finished eating, and now I’ve gone and worked up an appetite—”

“I’m just giving you a hard time,” Orville interrupts him and presses a kiss to his shoulder to hide the grin that’s taking over his face at having gotten Brad on the defensive.

“You little scamp,” Brad’s obviously grinning just judging from the tone of his voice, and he ruffles his fingers through Orville’s short, blonde hair, like there’s really anything he can do to make it worse right now.

“Wow… so _disrespectful_ ,” Orville teases him, leaning back a little bit and making a show of trying to fix his hair. “Do you treat all your dinner guests like this?”

“Oh, c’mon,” Brad huffs and chuckles, “Of course I do. Gotta give ‘em the full Leone Experience.”

“You pervert,” rather than judgmental, Orville sounds delighted at that realization. He knows Brad’s joking, but the fact that he’s getting comfortable enough joking about things like this around him is heartwarming.

“Takes one to know one,” Brad shoots back and tries (and fails) to hide his big, stupid grin.

“Well, I never!” Orville leans back just enough that he can touch a hand to his chest to fully play out the role he’s just slipped on — some scandalized Karen-type who’s heard the word ‘ass’ uttered in a Bon Appetit video and can’t believe her ears — but damn if that isn’t the truest thing.

“If you got an issue with it, I’ll give you the number for HR.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize I work here now. Are there benefits?”

“Oh, plenty, bud. Benefits, perks, the whole nine.”

Brad either spectacularly missed the joke, or he got it and just had a funny way of playing into it. Either way, Orville looks around the kitchen from the floor and comments, “I wonder if management knows people fuck in the kitchen. That’s gotta be some kind of health code violation.”

“Oh, you think? You wanna talk about health code violations?” Brad’s not mad — far from it, he’s grinning ear to ear. This is a back-and-forth they’ve had multiple times before via text and over the phone, bringing up that first day and night, rehashing and reliving it in conversation to calm the itch to spend another night like that.

“I stand by my argument that you definitely started it by gearing the whole video towards trying to get me to get mayonnaise on my mask.”

“Yer nitpicking,” which is always Brad’s reply when they get to this point in the ‘fight,’ and it trails off into nothing like it always does, nothing more than a playful excuse to bicker and recall the events of the walk-in to memory.

After a pause, Orville asks, “Do you want me to let you up?”

“Mm,” Brad hums, considering, and answers, “Not just yet.”


	5. The Morning After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the second day of their long weekend together, morning sheds new light on the nature of Brad and Orville’s undefined relationship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First and foremost, huge thanks are owed to nectarine-migraine of tumblr/nectarinemigraine of ao3 for being a truly incredible beta and for challenging me to be a better writer, this chapter wouldn't be nearly as good as (I hope) it is without you. 
> 
> Also huge thanks to soho-x and EnthusiasticAudience of tumblr for being such great cheerleaders, and letting me talk out problems with them all along the way. 
> 
> An additional note that I think is important to preface this chapter: this update has been a long time in the works. There are many, many reasons for this (2020 is a shit show, and I've had some personal setbacks, I could go on...). I also want to say that for a while, I wondered if anyone would even want to carry on reading this given how awful BA has been to its BIPOC employees -- and for a while, I didn't really want to write it for the same reasons. However, I talked to a number of people who still got a lot of enjoyment out of this fic, and saw it as a disambiguation and an escape (which it is), so I'm planning to carry on writing this and just continue to divorce it from BA more and more (I mean, it's very clearly an AU and a huge departure from reality anyway, so, y'know, why not). There are really very few thematic elements that have anything to do with BA itself, aside from the obvious presence as Brad's workplace. Besides, from the onset, this fic was purely self-indulgent, just me writing what I wanted to see as a result of the Orville/Brad collab, and so I'm going to carry on and see where that takes me. Everyone is welcome to come along or not, up to you. But I hope you stick around, because there's a lot in store.

They sleep late; it’s almost ten before Orville wakes and tries to convince himself he doesn’t need to get up and pee just yet because he doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to risk waking Brad when he’s got to disentangle himself from him. He pushes it as long as he can, watching Brad sleep, and he wonders if this was something he should have tried harder to avoid. He knows the truth is that he had hardly tried at all. After that first night, he’d been the one to put his number in Brad’s phone so they jumped from DMs to text messages, the one who’d made the first phone call one late night spent texting back and forth, the one to push for video calls. Despite his better judgment, he’d been the one to invite more each step along the way, to make his interest known, and now he wonders if he should have pumped the brakes at any point and held back.

The soft expression on Brad’s face as he sleeps is a counterpoint to those dark thoughts; the openness there, the slight parting of his lips, jaw slack — he’s beautiful. He wants to keep a picture of him like this with him always but he doesn’t dare to go for his phone, for fear of waking him and ruining it. Instead, he lingers as long as he’s able to, until he finally has to pull away.

At the sink, Orville splashes his face once he’s finished washing his hands and runs his fingers back through his short hair in an effort to tame it. Brushing his teeth and helping himself to Brad’s toothpaste, his thoughts turn to the events of the night before.

He’s remembering sitting perched at the peninsula and the way Brad looked in the dim light of the kitchen at night, naked and still-flushed, his hair wild as he tucked into the rest of the fish like a man starved. He would have liked to stay up with him longer and watch a movie, and it’s maybe a little shameful that he’d tapped out so early, given the time difference from LA meant that when they’d turned in it was barely eight for Orville, but he was tired from traveling and from the meeting in the city before coming down to Jersey. In the end, cutting the night short was for the best because Brad had worked a full day too before they’d even made it to the kitchen floor.

Orville leans forward to spit and rinses his toothbrush, tapping it on the edge of the sink. Looking back, he doesn’t regret that they’d fallen asleep before a second round as much as he might have expected to. It’s been a long time since he’s gone to sleep with someone curled at his back, and even though they’d drifted apart through the night when Brad settled down to sleep on his back in a sprawl, Orville had found his way back to him, tucking himself up alongside his long body and capitalizing on the fact that he threw off heat like a furnace to chase away the December chill.

Brad doesn’t wake until Orville returns, the movement of his weight shifting on the mattress as he settles back in beside him starts to cut through his sleep. At first it’s not enough to even open an eye for, but the lift of his consciousness comes with a little grunt and a sleepy blink that brings the warm memory of the night before rushing back to him and he smiles, flops his arm out to the side perpendicular to his body to make a space for Orville to settle against.

“Hey, good morning,” Orville says as he tucks himself against Brad’s side, palm rubbing over his bare chest as he gets comfortable. They’re both still naked and Brad is reminded of that fact as Orville cuddles closer.

“‘Morning,” Brad grumbles back with a wide, sleepy grin, eyes mostly closed as he stretches out his legs under the covers with another sleepy, gruff sound. He becomes aware of Orville leaning in for a kiss when he feels the brush of his lips and makes a half-hearted effort to evade him, sinking his head down further into the pillow while he tries to argue, “I got morning breath.”

“Mmm... I don’t care,” Orville follows him as he moves and kisses him, licks into his mouth to prove his point: he doesn’t care in the slightest that Brad’s got morning breath and he’s not going to be put off capitalizing on kissing him when the opportunity is presented. There aren’t many mornings where there’s going to be a chance for this, and he plans to enjoy the time they’ve got together this weekend, even if decorum would say they’re blowing right by some scripted, appropriate timeline of firsts. Orville’s never been one to subscribe to social norms.

Brad doesn’t get a chance to argue before he’s bowled over by Orville’s spontaneous affection, and he’d laugh at the suddenness of it if his mouth wasn’t otherwise occupied. When they part, Brad hums softly, smiling as he looks up at Orville from beneath heavy eyelids, and murmurs a sleepy, “You taste all minty.”

“I helped myself to your toothpaste,” Orville grins down at him, in all of his sleepy, rumpled, lazy-morning glory, and he’s unable to resist also helping himself to Brad’s mouth again. He asks permission wordlessly first with a bump nose to nose, and when Brad turns into the touch eagerly, Orville catches his mouth and lets himself in. There’s magic in Brad’s demeanor this morning, softer somehow than last night, unguarded and open.

Brad whispers in the space between them, “Yer doin’ a lot’a helping yourself.”

“You want me to stop?” Orville asks and presses a little kiss against his soft, bearded jaw, nosing along to breathe against the shell of his ear.

“Mm... no,” Brad shivers at the feel of Orville nuzzling against him, warm breath tickling his ear and raising the hair on the back of his neck. “I like it.”

Kind of an odd response, to say that he likes it that Orville’s helping himself — but he does. He likes the intimacy of it, the assumption, likes it when people feel comfortable enough in his home to help themselves to the fridge, to seconds of lunch or dinner. Brad likes that, domestic intimacy, sharing space and things like that. If Orville catches his meaning, he doesn’t let on as he continues with checking in, making sure they’re both still on the same page.

“Just say the word and I’ll be good,” Orville murmurs despite the fact that he really has no intention of being good. “Don’t wanna overstay my welcome,” he adds, sincerely. He doesn’t want Brad to regret inviting him to stay for the weekend — the weekend before Christmas, no less.

“You’re not,” Brad says without hesitation, more guileless than usual thanks to the fact that whatever filter he has hasn’t woken up yet. It’s a wonder he hadn’t said _never,_ said _you could never overstay your welcome,_ said something far more sentimental and telling than just what he had.

“Mm, good,” Orville ghosts his mouth down the soft line of Brad’s neck and finds a place there that he fits, sounding satisfied with Brad’s easy response.

A comfortable silence covers them over, one that’s punctuated with the soft sound of skin moving over skin, Brad’s hand over Orville’s back and shoulder, caressing, Orville’s leg shifting to tuck lazily between Brad’s, tracing the shape of his calf with the arch of his foot. They’re folding themselves together again, but it’s different than it was the night before, less urgent but with no less yearning. Orville isn’t trying to crawl inside Brad’s skin, instead his body is trying to memorize the shape of him.

Brad breaks the silence first: “Last night was friggin’ unreal,” and it’s not the first time he’s voiced a similar feeling. He’d definitely shared the sentiment the night before while they regrouped, more than hinted at it again while they piled all the dishes in the sink to be dealt with tomorrow (now today), whispered it to Orville in the dark of his bedroom as they curled up together beneath flannel sheets.

Orville grins wide against Brad’s shoulder. “Mmm, yeah? I guess it was pretty okay.”

“Pretty okay?” Brad laughs rather than second guess himself and them and everything, because while this is permeated in newness and uncertainty for him, there’s also a _rightness_ he can’t quite pinpoint or shake. It’s as undeniable as the presence of the other man in his bed, the weight of his body half-draped over him.

Brad’s laugh shakes Orville, with the way he’s laying on him like an overly affectionate cat, and Orville’s caught up in that contagious laughter, trying to keep it down so he can shoot back with, “Yeah, I mean, I’m not going to complain.”

“Why, I oughtta,” Brad winds up with a retort he can’t land because it’s too early in the day to try and string words together, not that he usually fares much better talking later in the day. Instead of carrying that thought on, he curls his arm briefly tight around Orville like he’s got a mind to wrestle him.

“You oughta what?” Orville asks, playing like he’s scandalized but doing a poor job of it with the grin that breaks through and the breathless laughter that chases the question, “You wanna go?”

If Brad catches on to the double entendre, the question of whether Orville’s suggesting they fight or fuck, he doesn’t let on.

“I’m just messin’,” Brad concedes easily, as quick to be riled as he is to give in. He has this energy about him like a golden retriever, sweet and excitable and eager to play but quick to roll over and show his belly if it meant food or attention. Orville had seen a glint of something a little darker, a little wilder last night that comes out when he’s worked up and that’s something he wants to find again, wants to push and find the limits of. But that’s something for later. They’ve got the whole weekend.

“Oh, sure,” Orville hums, smiling into Brad’s skin, mouth pressed to his shoulder and he seizes the opportunity to breathe in the musty morning scent of his skin, letting it chase the sharpness of the chill air from his nose. Orville keeps getting caught between the thought that they have time and that they’re running out of it, that there’s still the whole weekend ahead of them and that the clock on it is ticking. He’s trying not to think about the end so he can enjoy the time they have, but it’s easier said than done.

He falls back into their playful back and forth, using it as a buffer against something more real, but it’s like trying to dam a river with sand; It’s just a matter of time before he’s worn down. Before whatever traitorous feelings rising up in him have nowhere else to go.

He rubs a hand over Brad’s chest again and down, settles over the softness of his belly and searches lower until Brad moans in response. If the grin that spreads over his face says anything, it’s that he’d found what he’s looking for.

“Mmm… is this for me?” Orville asks as he wraps his hand around the base of Brad’s cock beneath the covers, gives a slow stroke and watches the way Brad’s eyes glaze over and slip shut. He’s still battling the last dregs of sleep, the heaviness of his limbs and the warmth of the bed, but it’s no match for the promise of messing around.

“Maybe,” Brad answers softly, blinking up at Orville, eyes flicking down over Orville’s face and stopping at his mouth, distracted by those full lips, caught up in thinking about them rather than acting and taking what it was he wanted — maybe imagining a flip of the script. “You can, uh, help yourself… my casa is your casa.”

Orville chuckles at the mashed-up phrasing that’s par for the course in almost everything Brad says. It’s that near-deadpan, wide-eyed serious look that accompanies these outlandish mix and match phrases that always makes it _so endearing_ , and it’s all he can do not to kiss him right then and there. But he doesn’t, he resists, fighting down a smirk as he asks, “Oh, is it now?”

Brad hums a soft _mhm_ , cheeks flushing as Orville’s skilled hand carries on working him over under the sheets, thumb rubbing over the slick, leaking head of his cock.

“I thought I was doing too much helping myself…” Orville teases, feels the way Brad’s hips start to squirm under the attention, eager and trying for more. It’s hard to discern what it is he wants, and Orville has to wonder if he even knows or if he’s just stealing the friction his body craves without knowing what he’s after.

“You can have whatever you want,” Brad hears himself say with Orville’s face so near his own that their mouths pressing together feels automatic, like the catch of magnets drawn together. The last word is barely out before it’s swallowed down between them, the open invitation of _whatever he wants_ impossibly delicious.

The way Brad says that has Orville wondering what more Brad wants to give or wants to take, but whatever’s on the table it’s a question for later. There’s a stir of uncertainty at the prospect of it being something more than physical that Brad’s offering, not sure that’s something he’s capable of, never mind the fact that some of the same thoughts are starting to claw at his chest. Right now, in the last sleepy moments before wakefulness takes them over, Orville knows what he wants.

“I think you should give it to me…” Orville murmurs, hand working its way back down his shaft, rubbing and cupping between his legs, fondling his balls, before working his way back up. He loves how heavy it feels in his hand, how thick, and he wants it like this: sleepy and slow and Brad fumbling around for words even more than usual.

“Oh, do you?” Brad’s voice dips low as Orville works him over until he’s hard and aching in his hand. Orville seems to know what he’s thinking with the way he watches his tongue skim over his teeth, that his attention is divided by the desire to freshen up, but he knows that’s absolutely out of the question. Orville interrupts him in the middle of that thought with a kiss that doesn’t shy away, one that steals its way in slowly, deepening with parted lips and the urging of his tongue to be let in. To keep Brad where he is.

“Yeah… you wanna be a good host, don’t you?” Orville asks as he pulls back, teeth catching his lower lip and drawing it into his mouth to worry and wet it.

“Mmm, yeah,” Brad manages, brows furrowing together as his gaze lingers, transfixed on Orville’s mouth, and if he was trying for a better response he’s failing to find words.

“Well, c’mon then,” Orville pushes and lets go, takes his hand back to an answering moan of loss from Brad as he turns and reaches for the nightstand where he’d set the bottle of lube the night before, fully expecting they’d need it again before too long. They hadn’t gotten to round two before, they’d fallen asleep too soon curled up in each other’s arms, but he’s glad he’d brought it in now that he didn’t need to get up and search for it.

The covers are flapped off of them in the move and Orville’s made a point to fully turn away from him and reach for the nightstand. Brad turns to look at how he stretches out for it in bed beside him, the lean muscles of his back and shoulders moving beneath his skin as he tries to grab hold without pulling entirely away. It has them tangled together still, ass against Brad’s hip and it wouldn’t take much to up the ante, but he doesn’t. He’s too caught up in watching how the sunlight filtering through the window catches on the long lines of Orville’s limbs, gilding his pale skin.

It’s hard to hold onto the nagging self-doubt that tells him he’s nowhere near worthy of this when Orville makes his desire crystal clear, so he does his best to let it go and reach for him instead. Orville’s only just caught the bottle when Brad turns to his side behind him, cock pressed clumsily against his ass, burying his face against the nape of his neck, looping an arm tightly around his torso.

Orville shivers at the move, the promise of feeling Brad bearing down on him like that. Brad’s big hand is hot like a brand on his skin as it moves down over his belly and catches his hip to pull his body back tight against his own. Orville needs Brad inside him already, needs to be being fucked _now,_ but he’s caught up in the feeling of Brad grinding against his ass, his hand finding better holds to draw his hips back. Fuck, he can feel the way Brad’s cock moves between them, bumps near but not where it’s wanted until Orville has to twist and urge it to press between his cheeks, feels the thick press of it nudge the back of his thighs. The pretense is gone, the joking about give and take and being a good host, and instead he’s reaching down to press the bottle against the back of Brad’s hand.

“Please, Brad…”

Brad wasn’t prepared for how it would feel to hear Orville say his name like that, desperation and something else bleeding into his voice, something Orville can’t hide and Brad can’t place. At the best of times, his voice cuts right through him, does things to him, but to hear that kind of vulnerability seeping through it stirs something in him, makes his heart rattle in his chest. He knows Orville’s said his name before, but this feels like it’s the first time he’s hearing him say it.

Brad’s slowed by the way the words hit, but he catches his meaning and takes the bottle and sets aside unpacking what he’d glimpsed in his voice for later. He leans away to get enough space between them so he can pour lube into his hand and spread it over his cock. Orville reaches back for Brad, looking for anything he can reach to guide him into fucking him but it’s graceless in its urgency and Brad’s fumbling slick fingers over his ass like he’s got a mind to ease him into it, get him ready. Maybe Orville needs that but he doesn’t want it, doesn’t have patience for it, so overdue with the desperation to get Brad inside him that he swats at his hand and grabs for his cock like he’s got a mind to help himself after all.

“…just fuck me…” There isn’t room for argument, not when Orville’s curling slim fingers around his cock the way he is, butting the slick head up against his cheeks, looking back at him over his shoulder, lids heavy with need, trembling for it.

Brad doesn’t have it in him to deny Orville anything, so he gives in, fits their bodies together the way Orville is demanding. It’s almost more than he can take to feel how tight Orville is as he sinks into him, how his hips jump under his hand as their bodies slot together. Orville turns his face into the pillow beneath his head to muffle the long, low groan that escapes as Brad takes him. He knows the limitations of his body; it’s overwhelming because it’s exactly what he’d asked for, immediate and without the preamble of fingers, and because it’s getting so much more difficult by the second to pretend that the sex isn’t all this is about.

Brad starts to say something against his shoulder that maybe was supposed to be words but comes out a nonsensical groan. It’s a slow start, figuring this out and fully fitting together like this, and it comes with interruptions. It’s barely a minute before they need to readjust, between their eagerness, Orville being too close to the edge, and Brad needing to find a place for his arm to go.

While Brad’s fishing his arm beneath Orville’s head, taking the place of his pillow, Orville’s inching back against Brad to gain distance from the edge and it stutters their progress. Brad catches on, scoots back a little bit to make way, but even though he grabs Orville’s hip with his free hand to inch him back along the bed with him, he still slips out of him as they move back and settle down. Barely the second Brad slips from him, Orville is fitting a hand back between them to guide Brad back where he needs him, needing everything at once.

This time when Brad sinks into him he can feel the rush of breath Orville exhales warm against his bicep, wordless. Brad’s free hand moves over his hip for leverage, surely, but there’s not much thought behind anything he’s doing; he’s just moving how he feels, feeding his craving for Orville’s skin, letting this be something their bodies negotiate and not something he gets in the way of. Brad doesn’t think of himself as particularly spectacular in bed, but when he’s able to escape his self-consciousness and focus on something outside himself, some higher pursuit, it translates into a presence in the moment that makes him a responsive lover, even if he’s sometimes awkward — and sometimes because of it.

To Orville, it feels like Brad’s everywhere — arm beneath his cheek, face against his shoulder, the full length of him pressed against his back like spoons, and his cock buried inside him. Orville reaches to caress the back of Brad’s hand that’s holding his hip, feeling the knuckles and tracing the length of his digits like he’s thinking about lacing their fingers together; both a surprisingly tender gesture and a far cry from the night before, when he’d been sucking on them like a preview.

Brad’s hand moves, slips away from Orville’s hip and rubs low over his belly just north of his cock, dragging through the soft trail of hair there. He’d be lying to say there wasn’t a passing thought of seeing if he could feel himself through Orville’s belly, that first night so imprinted on him he can’t help it. Orville knows what he’s doing, picks up on it in the press of his hand like he’s feeling for something, and feels a thrill of pride mixed with a rush of how fucking hot it is for Brad to be looking for that without any provocation.

This isn’t fast or filthy like last night was, not the kind of sex that propels them across the room and threatens to knock the furniture down — it’s slower, deeper. They’re grinding more than anything, Brad holding Orville close to keep them slotted together and Orville just squirming his hips back again and again and somehow it’s perfect. Perfect and not enough all at once. To Orville it feels like limbo, like he could stay here moving like this and be lost in the slow build of sensation and for a while — and for once — that’s exactly what he wants.

Orville takes advantage of the fact that Brad can’t see his face, masked in their positions and the dim light of the curtained bedroom and lets himself feel without censor. It’s not that the times before this meant less, but he’d felt he had to school his expressions, had to keep the mess of emotion in him tamped down tight, and with freedom from scrutiny comes the perilous freedom to get lost inside himself. To let himself stretch and plumb the depths of these feelings that threaten to pull him under like a dark current below the surface, until finally he has to pull back for fear of getting so lost in this he lets on somehow.

Time stretches out around them and here and there the grinding rhythm between them starts to break, and maybe it’s Orville’s fault, too greedy to keep it just to a slow roll of his pelvis, but maybe it’s Brad grabbing for his hip and taking advantage of the leverage and thrusting harder every now and then. Maybe it’s one or both of their yearning hands dragging past Orville’s aching cock, but it’s not long before it’s not enough.

Orville lets on fitfully, wordlessly, hand flitting from Brad’s wrist and back along his forearm to find the curve of ass and pull him tight, urging him to stay tight, to buck into him. Fingernails dig into the soft flesh like spurs into the ribs of a horse, but the hard, demanding gesture is chased with a softer one — grabbing for the arm Brad has curled under his head like he’s looking for reassurance or something like it.

“Fuck,” Orville’s voice is tight and he tries to swallow against the rising tide of need inside him, trying to figure out how to let on what it is his body is screaming for. He gets to a point where he almost has a thought strung together and it slips away like sand between his fingers, lost beneath how good Brad feels fucking him like this.

Without warning, Orville finds himself half-pressed down against the bed — instead of fucking side by side like spoons, Brad’s half-atop him, hand tight on his hip. The other arm is still acting as a pillow for now — until Orville shifts enough that Brad can move it, and when he does he brackets Orville’s chest with it, hugging him from behind.

“I got’chu,” Brad breathes against his ear in gruff reassurance, and if Orville thought he was everywhere before that was nothing compared to how it is now. Orville grabs for Brad where he can reach him just to have somewhere to hold on, and he squirms — plants a knee, strains, uses any point of contact anywhere to grind himself back on Brad the way he needs, the way it feels so damn good. The feeling of safety is overwhelming, and the crush of being held down and hugged and pinned and fucked all at once is satisfying a need he’d barely known he’d had. This is getting dangerous, the more they do this the easier it feels like it’d be to open his mouth and say something he might regret just because he’s getting it good with the same man more than once for a change.

But even he knows he’s lying if he thinks that’s all it is, because it’s so much more than that.

Brad lets go of his hip, sweeps his big hand down between Orville’s body and the mattress to grope for him, to try and wrap a hand around him. The angle’s all wrong but it doesn’t matter, what with the way the move shifts their bodies together more tightly, Brad’s breath coming hot against Orville’s ear with the effort and it gives Orville something to grind against between rolling his hips and squirming backwards.

This time Orville comes first, comes first so fast he hardly expected it. The move to reach down and jerk him off had stuttered their rhythm and should have thrown him but he’d already been close, close enough that practically anything would send him tripping over the edge — and what ends up being that final push is the rough and clumsy sweep of Brad’s big hand.

It hits him hard and he goes tense, shuddering between the solid press of Brad at his back and the bed beneath him, a deep full-throated groan muffled against the mattress. It’s only later that he realizes he’d grabbed the sheets so hard he’d unmade the bed, a fistful of flannel tight in his hand as he comes hard over Brad’s hand.

“Frig—” Brad stammers, tries to breathe but stalls out, gasps sharply against Orville’s neck, startled by how fast he’s coming on the heels of Orville’s orgasm. He’s caught up in it, lost in Orville’s sweat damp skin, and the sound that trembles between them raises the hairs on the back of Orville’s neck. He’s not going to have the brainpower later to pick apart what it was that had gotten to him, but for the record it’s some combination of that hard-won cry and the way he shook beneath him like he’d been breaking apart.

Brad comes buried deep inside Orville and hears him groan again beneath him, feels him shift, tuck his chin, press his forehead to the bed. Brad takes his hand back, smearing Orville’s come over his belly and the sheets along the way to reaching blindly for Orville’s nearest hand. Slowly and awkwardly their fingers link up as Orville lets go of the tangle of sheets he’d had hold of.

Their breathing slows together, Brad nosing Orville’s neck and shoulder as the both of them settle back into their skin. Neither of them say anything just yet, both of them sort of lost, sort of reeling from the emotion of this. Orville needs a minute to recover before he can turn back over, before he feels capable of returning to the light back-and-forth. Right now it feels heavy, like there’s something that needs to be said, something he’s not ready to say. But he’s not alone, Brad’s grappling with a similar thing, one he feels totally unable to even wrap his head around because it’s complicated with so much doubt. If it feels like they’re avoiding something, they are.

Brad squeezes Orville’s hand in his like conversation, breaking the silence with the affectionate gesture.

Orville returns the little squeeze and actually breaks the silence with a soft, murmured, “Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” Brad hums, nosing into Orville’s ear. They can’t just stay here like this, no matter how sleepy he’s starting to feel again, because if they do they’ll never get out of bed and underneath the pull of the afterglow, Brad’s hungry too. He grumbles because he knows he’s got to move, a sound of disbelief that he’s not yet in motion just from the sheer desire for breakfast.

“Mm, gimme a kiss,” Orville says once he feels confident he’s come back into himself enough, twists back over his shoulder and manages to catch Brad’s mouth briefly. The angle is awkward given their positions but still something he’d needed, simply taking advantage of proximity and most definitely not seeking a token of reassurance.

“We oughta get up. Go eat,” Brad mumbles against his mouth and comes back, drops his lips to Orville’s shoulder and hums, holds the ‘m,’ a kiss landing with a loud ‘mwa.’

Orville can’t help but smile at that. Somehow, that silly shoulder kiss felt sweeter and more intimate than the kiss Orville had stolen from his lips, and it helps to pull him back out of his thoughts, tuck them away again for later.

“I wanna shower first… I’m a mess.”

The smirk in Brad’s voice is audible though he’s trying to swallow it down, “Mm… that sucks, bud.”

“What, you trying to tell me you’re _not_ a mess?”

“I mean, yeah, but it’s not gonna stop me from getting food in me.”

“You’re gross,” Orville chuckles at him, their foreheads tilted together and he nudges back in his direction with an elbow before rolling away, but it’s a half-hearted complaint at best. He’s starting to be a little less surprised by things like this, Brad’s personality fitting into what he’s learned of him over the weeks they’ve been talking. Not that that will stop him from playing up his reactions when it serves him.

“You go on first, I’ll get breakfast started and get cleaned up after,” Brad insists, trying to be gracious, maybe even gentlemanly. He hasn’t had this kind of company over in too long, and he’s trying so hard to be a good host that he’s in danger of getting in his own way.

“How about you join me?” Orville asks him with a slow, inviting grin and shifts beneath the covers to slowly drag his calf up along one of Brad’s legs.

Brad considers it, and he _wants to_ but he’s not sure about it for a lot of reasons, his handful of insecurities being top on the list. It’s one thing to let his guard down when they’re in bed — or, y’know, in the walk-in — but it’s another to do so standing naked together in the well-lit bathroom. Which is strange, because Brad wouldn’t count himself as _shy_. He’s had more than his fair share of naked and half-naked shenanigans, streaking and the like, but it’s a whole different thing when it comes to showering together with someone as gorgeous as Orville .

“You sure you wanna? I’m way too tall — I’m a water hog, I’ll prob’ly block out the faucet or somethin’...”

“Hey, what happened to my casa is your casa?” Orville asks with a gentle smile and leans in, insinuating himself in close enough that they bump noses and he can steal a kiss.

“You’re twisting my words up against me,” is all Brad can think of in argument and he chuckles a little awkwardly, the distance and uncertainty starting to melt away when their lips meet.

But Orville ventures again, just to be sure he’s not overstepping, “I’d really like it if you did… I’d hate to waste any of the time we’ve got this weekend…” He punctuates the invitation with a slow sweep of his hand down from Brad’s chest and down over the soft swell of his belly to catch his hip, uses the leverage to angle himself in a little closer like the shower isn’t the only invitation he’s dangling, like he’s baiting Brad to chase his mouth for a kiss, too.

And Brad is helpless to resist or deny him. Letting himself fall for the invitation, he leans to kiss Orville and pulls back to murmur, “Mmkay, if you insist… but just remember, when you’re cold and I’m blockin’ out the stream, you asked for this.”

“I think I’ll manage just fine,” Orville leaves a little peck of a kiss on the corner of Brad’s mouth, and as the the two men slowly move to extricate themselves from each other, Orville adds, “Give me five, then I’ll let you know when to come on in… unless you need a few minutes alone too?”

“Nah, I think I’m good for now…” Brad says as he settles back against the mattress, letting Orville head off to the bathroom on his own. He’s almost drifted back off to sleep when he hears the door open again and creak on its hinges.

“C’mon, sleepyhead,” Orville calls out as he comes back out to the bedroom to fish around in his suitcase for something. Brad gets up with a little grunt and heads on into the bathroom, still struggling to shake this feeling of self-consciousness as he stops to brush his teeth, eyeing Orville in the mirror behind him as he follows him in.

“Think I could borrow a towel?” Orville asks when he comes back in holding his toiletry case, sidling up beside Brad and taking the opportunity to let his hand cup Brad’s soft, inviting ass, but the look on his face is one of pure innocence. A look that seems to say: ‘ _someone’s cupping your ass, you say? Gosh! It certainly couldn’t be me!’_

Brad grins and it makes him dribble toothpaste and he’s got to lean over the sink or else he’s going to wear it. He finishes up, spitting the toothpaste he’s got in his mouth and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Yeah, sure,” he answers before rinsing his toothbrush. _Much better._

Brad replaces his toothbrush in its cup with a soft clink and moves to push the nearby accordion style door open to expose an unsurprising mess of a linen closet. The towels and things are clean and folded, but nothing matches and there’s a full shelf dedicated to half-finished grooming products he’s been sent from companies looking for free social media advertising.

“You get pick’a the litter,” Brad says as he pulls out the top two towels, blue and white, and offers them to Orville to pick.

Orville takes the white one, a smile tugging the corners of his mouth at how cute Brad’s being about everything. “Thanks, babe.”

The fact that Orville had called him babe doesn’t really settle in until a few moments later, and he likes it. Brad hangs his towel up on a hook near the shower and Orville looks around for a second hook but doesn’t find one, and asks, “Mind if I share?”

“Oh, go on ahead, here,” Brad takes the towel back and drapes it over his so they’re both up and ready for them when they’re done. Being helpful helps him keep from thinking about the awkwardness of this. Even still, Brad’s not one to overthink this — should he let Orville get in first or should he? — he just blunders on ahead. Climbing in the shower, he goes about turning on the taps and explains, “There’s a trick to ‘em. Ya gotta turn the shower part on fast because it comes out way hotter through the faucet than it does through the shower head and otherwise you end up burning your feet.”

“I wouldn’t mind it either way, but thanks for the tip,” Orville says, and he’s moving to get in the shower when he stops short and suddenly they’re both talking at once.

“Oh right, you like scalding showers—”

“Oh Brad, no—”

They both fall silent and Brad looks up from the taps at Orville, eyes round. He thought he’d sidestepped the worst of his self-consciousness but here it surges ahead like a riptide threatening to pull him under, finishes what Orville had started to say with awful, whispered things to fill in the blanks. Thankfully, he doesn’t have long to wonder and get too carried away because Orville mercifully continues, entirely ignoring the comment about water temperature.

“—not Mane ’n Tail.”

A high little hoot of nervous laughter escapes Brad at the relief that the _oh no_ wasn’t something more serious, and he defends himself. “Hey man, it’s good stuff! Been using it for years—”

“You’ve got shelves full of _good stuff_ , and you’re using a horse two-in-one?” Orville sounds utterly incredulous.

“It’s for humans!” Brad insists helplessly, grabbing the bottle to try and find proof to back up that claim, but Orville isn’t hearing it.

“Wait, have you been a horse all along?”

Brad’s standing there, naked in the shower, half under the stream and trying to read the tiny print on the back of the bottle — and reading is no easy feat for him under the best of circumstances. The idea of him secretly being a horse strikes him as too funny and he laughs, distracted from his self-defense research, and grins at Orville, cheeks round as he asks him, “Why, you gonna ride me again?”

“I mean, it was a pretty good ride the first time…” Orville just can’t help giving the playful wink at the end there, and Brad’s gone laughing again. “Put that down, we’re not using Mane ’n Tail today when you have _a whole shelf_ full of nice shit _._ ”

Brad peeks out of the shower after Orville as he goes over to his toiletry kit sitting on the edge of the sink and pulls out a few travel sized bottles.

“You’re not gonna grab something from the shelf?” Brad asks, confused, given that Orville’s referenced the unused shampoos a few times, and there’s a lot more there than the three ounces of each that Orville had been able to fly with.

“Clearly you didn’t like them, if they’re sitting unused. Might as well try mine.”

Orville climbs into the shower with Brad now and sets the little plastic bottles on the shower shelf.

“You want it hotter?” Brad asks, feeling awkward and stepping back closer to the taps to make room for Orville beneath them.

“It’s alright,” Orville says as he moves in, ducking his head to get wet and ruffling his hands through his short blond hair. Despite his assertion that he’s alright, he gives a little shiver at the warm-but-not-hot water that he’s half-beneath.

“I can take it a little hotter… dunno ‘bout scalding. I’m a tender boy,” they both crack up at that as Brad bends to turn the cold tap down a bit, letting the hot tip the scales a little bit more.

“Tender?” Orville asks with a smirk as he moves to slip past Brad so he can stand fully beneath the stream.

“Tender,” Brad asserts, letting Orville by and rubbing his eyes with his knuckles and pushing his hair back. It’s a wild mess on the best of days, long and frizzy and thinning more than he’d like, and wet he feels like a poodle caught in the rain.

Orville’s still getting wet and rubbing his hands over his naked body and somehow, despite all they’ve shared, Brad feels this inexplicable shyness pull his attention from Orville’s body and he reaches out for one of the little bottles and pops the cap open and gives it a sniff.

“Oh, this smells _nice,_ ” Brad’s not looking at Orville so he doesn’t see the smirk that crosses his face to watch Brad standing there with his nose in the travel bottle. When it looks like Brad’s going to pour some out into his hand, Orville interrupts him.

“Wait,” Orville says and takes the bottle. He checks the label — _body wash_ — and then sets it back on the shelf and picks up _shampoo_ instead. He flips the cap open, pours a little into his palm and sets the bottle back down before working it between his hands and reaches up to start working it through Brad’s long hair.

Brad tenses a little like he’s afraid his secret’s going to get out, that his hair isn’t as good or as full as he’d like it to be, but that only lasts so long when Orville is carrying on gently massaging his long fingers over Brad’s scalp.

“This okay?” Orville asks softly as he gently combs his fingers through Brad’s hair, careful not to pull at any snags he finds, and he can feel the full body shiver that steals down Brad’s spine before he manages to answer.

“Yeah… it’s good,” he murmurs. He doesn’t have any more words than that because he’s getting lost in how good this feels. It almost feels like he’s floating, Orville’s fingertips and short nails scrubbing over his scalp so gently, and the longer it goes on, the more Brad feels like he’s slipping into some kind of trance beneath Orville’s touch.

“C’mon, lean back,” Orville’s voice is low as he curls a hand around Brad’s shoulder and urges him back beneath the shower head, reaching up to help guide the water through his hair to rinse him clean. When the water’s running clear, Orville gently tucks Brad’s hair behind his ears and leans in to press a kiss against his shoulder and murmurs, “There you go.”

Orville lingers a little bit there, one arm looped around Brad from behind, fingers digging in a little at his collarbone, but finally he lets go with one final kiss against the back of his shoulder. He takes the shampoo up again and makes quick work of sudsing up his own short hair, managing it before Brad regains the presence of mind to think of reciprocating. Orville ducks back to rinse and then he picks up the conditioner, puts a quarter sized amount in his palm and starts to work it through Brad’s hair slowly, smoothing it down from the roots to the tips. He takes care to work some in from the underside, scrunches it up a little bit, an excuse to get his fingers back in Brad’s hair, to scrub gently at his scalp, at the base of his neck, to watch the way he leans back into it like some great beast angling to be petted. Orville smooths conditioner through his own hair as well, and doesn’t move to rinse out either of them before he goes for the body wash.

Orville presses his mouth against Brad’s shoulder,wordlessly urging him to take a step away from the water. With his arms looped around Brad, he pours out some of the soap into his hands and starts lathering it into his skin, over his chest and shoulders and low down the front of his body. Sweeping back up his sides, he gently urges his arms up and when Brad finally figures out what he’s angling for and lifts his arms up awkwardly, sort of squirming when he feels Orville sudsing up his armpits.

“Are you ticklish?” Orville whispers softly, not wanting to break the spell that’s taken them over, this almost magical moment of intimacy coming on the heels of such keyed-up nerves.

“Yeah,” Brad manages, but it feels like his voice is coming from miles away.

“Sorry,” Orville answers fast, and backs off, careful not to tickle him as he soaps him up and urges his arms back down.

It feels to Brad like he’d been in the middle of something, running a marathon and breathless or choking back a sob, because his voice sounded so foreign to his ears. He’s not used to this kind of attention, and there’s a big part of him that’s been trying to keep a distance, that keeps reminding him that whatever this is with Orville Peck can’t become what it is he craves. How could it? Brad can feel himself getting wound back up in that self-doubt that wants to convince him that something this intimate isn’t something he can have.

Orville unwittingly chips away at the wall of Brad’s fears with the press of a kiss to the back of his neck, at the top of his spine and reaches for more of the body wash and starts to soap down his back and leans in to hug him from behind, using his body to help lather him. Orville tucks his chin over Brad’s shoulder, nuzzling against the side of his head as his hands move down Brad’s arms, giving a gentle squeeze over his biceps before carrying on down to lace their fingers loosely together.

Brad doesn’t even realize Orville had pulled to step back under the water until he feels Orville’s fingers in his hair again, gently raking through to rinse it out. His own rinses out easy, short as it is, and then he’s taking care to rinse the soap from their bodies, having to separate to get all of it gone. Once they’re rinsed clean, Orville pulls Brad in close for an embrace, front to front, their arms curled around each other as Orville layers his skin in overlapped kisses, collarbone and where his neck meets it as they stand both half-under the shower, neither of them making a move to get out.

Brad’s been quiet an awful long time, and there’s something about the rhythm of his breath that prompts Orville to check in with him.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” Brad answers, voice thick, tongue clumsy in his mouth, “…this is… really nice.”

“Yeah, it is,” Orville smiles and noses into Brad’s neck. Predictably, given the fact that they’d both used Orville’s soaps, Brad smells like him and the warm, woody, almost spicy citrus scent of his body wash clinging to him _does something_ to Orville. Makes him feel possessive, like he’s laid a claim on his skin. It’s intoxicating to know that later on, when he’s got to slip out for a few hours to do an interview in Manhattan, that Brad’s going to be here smelling like he’d bathed in him.

It’s a long time before Orville speaks up again, and when he does it’s prompted in part because he hears Brad’s stomach rumbling in hunger.

“We ought to get out… my fingers are prunes, and I don’t want you to die of hunger.”

Brad would have kept holding out and holding on a little longer in spite of everything, just basking in the feeling of being held, but he knows Orville’s right. They’ve got to get out before the water runs cold, and he’s been starving since before they’d showered.

So they do. On this side of it, the awkwardness is gone and it’s replaced by hesitance. They’re both reluctant to leave the warm comfort of the shower and each other’s arms, to have to face the reality of drying off and getting dressed. The fact that Orville’s got to go out for an interview in the city means they’re going to lose a few precious hours together, and it feels to Orville as though they’re both slowing around in denial of him having to leave, even if it’s the thing that had enabled Orville to come in the first place. There’s plenty of time to make up for the loss afterwards, after all they’ve still got the rest of the weekend, but still there’s an air of knowing they have to part soon as they get dressed.

Orville takes longer, because he’s doing his full, multi-step skin-care routine, running product through his short hair (even though it couldn’t matter less, given the fact that he’ll be wearing the mask and hat for the interview) and finishes with cologne before heading back to Brad’s bedroom and getting dressed in jeans and a plain black tee, knowing what he wears to the interview doesn’t matter much because the stylist is going to have him change as soon as he arrives.

When Orville finally emerges from the bedroom, he finds Brad in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. It should be noted that Brad, who doesn’t have to go out today, is wearing pajama pants and a t-shirt, looking like the coziest and most relaxed version of himself. The radio is playing Nirvana and Brad, who doesn’t know he’s being watched, is humming along to _Oh Me_ and swaying while he fiddles the spatula all around under the perimeter of the eggs he’s got in the pan.

“What’s going on here?” Orville asks as he comes around the live-edge countertop to deliver a little peck right to Brad’s cheek while he works, one that Brad leans to better receive.

“Hey baby, you want some of my huevos?” Brad asks with a big, cheeky grin, not satisfied with a cheek kiss and leans in for a real one.

Orville parts from Brad with a laugh and a question, “Your what now?”

“Eggs, bud! I’m making breakfast. Got coffee brewing, toast in the broiler toasting, and I’m cooking up some eggs. What can I do ya for? How do you like your eggs?”

“Any way but fertilized, I’m too young to be a mother,” Orville says, his hand rubbing up over Brad’s back, feeling the texture of the design on the back of his shirt beneath his fingers. They’d just showered barely fifteen minutes ago, and Brad’s already warm and slightly sweaty from the heat of the kitchen.

“Uh oh,” Brad laughs, high and amused, and starts to roll the eggs in the pan over themselves to create a delicate omelet. “Seriously though, you want an omelet? Scramble? Whatever you want, sky’s the limit, nothing’s too good for you, bud.”

“That omelet looks good,” Orville comments, leaning against the shelving by the stove, clinking a hanging pan against the metal rack, the scene of the previous night’s activities.

“You want one of Brad’s perfect omelets? Coming right up.” Brad turns away from the stove to go for a plate, and that’s when Orville clocks what the back of his shirt actually says.

It’s a big logo like it’s for a tackle shop, but it reads: ‘Cptn. Jack Hoff, MASTER BAITER, Tackle Shop and Reel Repair, Let the professional staff at Jack’s get you lubed up and master baited today! …because you just can’t beat a dead squid! It’s all done by hand!’

“Whoa there, hold on, what’s with that shirt?”

Brad stops, plate in hand, and looks down at his shirt, the front of which reads: Certified Master Baiter. Realization dawns over his face as to which shirt it is he’s wearing, and he chuckles, “Oh, this? You like? I got it on a trip to Baltimore.”

“So you get this joke but you don't get salad tossing.”

Brad can’t help that he tinges a little bit pink at the mention of _salad tossing_ , and he blunders on past it with ever more denial, “What are you talking about? This is a serious tackle shop.”

“Serious tackle shop _my ass,_ ” Orville laughs and just shakes his head.

“What?” Brad’s voice lilts high, “I’m serious. I’m a professional, certified and everything. You need to get master baited? I’m your man.”

Orville can’t stop the wide, devious smirk that steals onto his face, doesn’t even try. He gives a nod, mostly humoring Brad, but at the same time he knows first hand there’s real truth in that, if the ever-escalating video calls that had led up to this weekend have been anything to go by.

“I’ll have to keep that in mind.”

Brad plates up the first omelet and turns to set it on the peninsula, setting another plate over the top of it to keep it warm, and starts cracking more eggs. “You want two or three?”

“Three, thanks.”

“I gotcha,” Brad says, tossing the shells in a little bowl. As he starts whisking them up, he asks, “You like coffee?”

“Hell yeah. Smells great,” he gives a little nod to the coffee pot on the far counter that’s actively percolating and watches as Brad’s face lights up and he whisks a little faster.

“Well then, can I interest you in the house specialty, Café _Ooh La La?_ ”

Another laugh escapes Orville and he just gives a shake of his head and asks, “What, pray tell, is Café Ooh La La?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Brad says and earns another helpless snort from Orville as he starts in with, “So, you start with drip coffee, steamed milk, and once you’ve got a nice foam on the top, you sprinkle brown sugar on top. That’s the _ooh la la._ ”

“Ooh la la,” Orville can’t resist echoing back to Brad with a wag of his eyebrows and a cheeky grin. He’s always prepared to not be accommodated in situations where there’s dairy present, and that means that even though he doesn’t like his coffee black, he’s taken it that way before because there wasn’t another option. He’s just about to open his mouth again to remind Brad he doesn’t do milk when Brad heads him off at the pass.

“—I know what you’re gonna say, but I got your fake milks bought in, bud.” Maybe in another moment, he’d have felt a little self-conscious admitting just how much planning he’d put into the food this weekend, but right now he’s riding the high of this morning and the shower they’d shared after and he’s damn near giddy for it. “I got oat and soy milk and all kindsa hippie shit.”

“Hippie shit. Wow, okay. Is that what I am to you, now?” Orville tries hard to sound insulted when it couldn’t be further from the truth. In actuality, he’s beyond charmed by how thoughtful Brad is, by the lengths he’d clearly gone to in planning this weekend.

“A little bit, yeah,” Brad says, and instantly backtracks, voice pitching up a half-octave. “Maybe. I dunno.”

“I’m just saying,” Orville tries to tamp down a grin as he leans into the metal industrial shelving casually, watching as Brad swirls the eggs around the pan. “Like, have you seen yourself lately?”

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?” Brad lets out a whoop of laughter and clicks the heat down a little, fiddling with the pan’s handle.

“Nothing, nothing… just, you know, those woven shoes.”

“You doggin’ on my shoes again, bud?”

“I would never! But… I did see that one pic of you on your instagram…”

“What picture?” Brad asks, stopping in his slow scrape around the perimeter of the eggs as he looks sidelong at Orville.

“Couple years back maybe… red scarf, hair in a bun, low cut top… very ‘backpacking through Europe’ vibe you had going on then…”

“Oh _Gawd,_ ” Brad guffaws, “You can’t hold that one against me. Wait, how far back are you going through my instagram?”

Orville blushes out of nowhere because he hadn’t counted on being called out like that and the answer is damning because he’s gone all the way back. He’s so used to relying on the mask to shield him from being really seen that when he is, he doesn’t know what to do with the scrutiny, and he defaults to deflecting the attention back on Brad.

“Oh, come on,” Orville says finally, “Like you haven’t gone all the way through mine too.”

Orville doesn’t expound on that, just lets it sit there between them because he suspects Brad isn’t unaware of the brand of photo he’s been consistent in liking on Orville’s feed, which happens to be preferentially any that feature Orville shirtless or otherwise flashing skin. Now it’s Brad’s turn to blush, a helpless little laugh huffing out of him as he scrapes around the omelet to give his hands something to do.

“Too-chay.”

The smirk comes over Orville’s face instantly at the mispronunciation. “You mean touché?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said,” Brad feigns aggravation, bringing his eyebrows together in what’s meant to pantomime a snarl, but he’s grinning too much to be taken seriously. Rather than give Brad more shit for it, Orville leans in and brushes still-damp hair back behind his ear and presses an affectionate kiss to his cheek.

“Mmm… you smell good,” he hums, nosing Brad’s skin and gently combing his long hair with his fingertips, lingering when he feels the taller man shiver beneath the attention.

“I smell like you,” is about all Brad’s got the presence of mind to say because whatever else was on his mind was derailed by the delicious drag of Orville’s nails down the nape of his neck.

Orville lands another kiss on his cheek, drops his hand to Brad’s shoulder and parts with a squeeze. “I know. I like it.”

**Author's Note:**

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